Stephanie

“How I came not to care about other people’s opinions is something of a mystery even to me. I was born with a compass. It was the luck of my draw. This compass has been incalculably beneficial for writing —for everything, really— and for that reason I take very good care of it. How do you take care of your internal compass? You don’t listen to anyone who tells you to do something as consequential as having a child. Think about that one for a second.”
― Ann Patchett, These Precious Days: Essays

“Remember the deer.” There were deer in the park, but not too many. They were not good near the cars. In fact, they were strangely susceptible, oddly vulnerable, especially at night. There were few cars in the park, but with their bright lights, blinding moving moonlights, they were visible a million miles away, and so easy to avoid. The deer, though, they were drawn to the lights, and caught by the lights, and killed by the lights. Every few months, we would find a deer in the road, struck dead, and it would baffle us. Why did they get so close when the lights and the sounds and the smells of the cars were so obvious? “We all have weaknesses,” Freya noted… “We all have something that blinds us to threats.”
― Dave Eggers

“Instead of sleeping that night I revised my end of the conversation in my head over and over, a lifelong pastime I always rationalized as productive since the lessons could apply to future interactions, though that never seemed to happen.”
― Holly Brickley, Deep Cuts

“Julia recognizes it, that edge-of-adulthood progression: tightly wound and hyperconscious teenage preferences - dictated for centuries, inevitably, by a tasteless few - giving way to the awareness that you’re allowed to like some of the things that you’re not supposed to like, that doing so may distinguish you, and that someone else might also like the forbidden thing, or simply witness you liking it and love you for it. Her daughter is piecing together her own interior rule book; this seems as marvelous a development as her learning to crawl.”
― Claire Lombardo