Mario

“Women have made me; and also unmade. From Reverend Mother to the Widow, and even beyond, I have been at the mercy of the so-called (erroneously, in my opinion!) gentler sex.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“Life is divided up into phases. Each one is very different from the others, and you have to be able to recognise what is expected of you in each phase. That's the secret of successful living”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“This is not what I had planned; but perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“All were in sorrow, or had been, or soon would be.

It was the nature of things.

Though on the surface is seemed every person was different, this was not true.

At the core of each lay suffering; our eventual end; the many loses we must experience on the way to that end.

We must try to see one another in this way.

As suffering limited beings-

Perennially outmatched by circumstance, inadequately endowed with compensatory graces.

His sympathy extended to all in this instant, blundering in its strict logic, across all divides.”
― George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo