Mary

“I have come to realize that useless, directionless anger is one of my greatest character defects, and when I indulge myself in it, I am remaining in a problem, not its solution.”
― Randy Blythe, Dark Days: A Memoir

“Later I would wish I'd used that time not only to luxuriate in a shared silence but also to talk more with my mother, to ask her questions, about her youth, her childhood, her own mother, her family's ways before the Greeks came to these lands, the songs they sang and foods they cooked and gods they loved or feared, the whole scope of those past generations and what had been lost; I would wish that I'd filled in my knowledge of her stories and the stories at the root of her that were at the root of me as well; and also, I'd wish simply to have talked with her, to have heard her voice while I still could, to have pulled it into my skin like welcome ointment, her voice, her luminous voice, the voice of the only person who might have protected me if she'd had the power.”
― Caro De Robertis

“It would be a safe choice, a comfortable choice that no one could fault her for, but it does mean that every day she would have to sit in her room and look at her beige walls and wonder what could have been if she had painted them bright yellow or pink. What if she had forgone paint entirely? Or better yet, what if there were no walls at all? Only sky, sunlight, salty water, fresh rain, and spring flowers and no one else around to comment on the paint color of the walls.”
― Sydney J. Shields, The Honey Witch

“Growing up in the American South as a boy, I personally witnessed people of an advanced age make a conscious decision to question what they had been taught to believe their entire lives when they began to realize that their parents were wrong. It is not an overnight process to unlearn a lifetime of what basically amounts to primitive superstition, but in this day and age, where an unfathomable amount of information is instantly and freely available to anyone with a smart phone, there is no excuse to not at least make a start.”
― Randy Blythe, Dark Days: A Memoir