Henry Le Nav

“Harold believed that beauty was what happened between people, was in a sense the trace of what had happened, so he in truth found her, though minutely creased and puckered and sagging, more beautiful than the unused girl whose ruins she thought of herself as inhabiting. Such generosity of perception returned upon himself; as he lay with Janet, lost in praise, Harold felt as if a glowing tumor of eternal life were consuming the cells of his mortality.”
― John Updike, Couples

“I believe real faith grows from the sanctification of the ordinary. When as a couple you commit on a regular basis to going to bed early to talk, and perhaps to making love afterward, that’s a sanctification of the ordinary.”
― Stephen Snyder, M.D., Love Worth Making: How to Have Ridiculously Great Sex in a Lasting Relationship

“But I believe that the grand unifying theory that explains the paradox of tragedy is (like most such theories) deceptively simple: We don’t actually welcome tragedy per se. What we like are sad and beautiful things—the bitter together with the sweet. We don’t thrill to lists of sad words, for example, or slide shows of sad faces (researchers have actually tested this). What we love is elegiac poetry, seaside cities shrouded in fog, spires reaching through the clouds. In other words: We like art forms that express our longing for union, and for a more perfect and beautiful world. When we feel strangely thrilled by the sorrow of “Moonlight Sonata,” it’s the yearning for love that we’re experiencing—fragile, fleeting, evanescent, precious, transcendent love.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Pretty bows on a pile of sh$t only make it harder to flush.”
― Kimberly McCreight, A Good Marriage