Alicia

“And if I had to give up this work or if my career never really panned out, it would still have been worth every second of it. What a privilege all this has been, I thought as we bounced along. How trivial and petty many of my concerns around my job were. This moment and the thousands of others on the road over the last ten years were the reward. I was filled by a sense of clarity that comes with knowing beyond any doubt that you are exactly where you are meant to be. I felt infused by purpose, that great elusive source of a good life.”
― Jane Ferguson, No Ordinary Assignment: A Memoir

“People talk about one life…one chance. But I reckon a single life is made up of a dozen or more roles and responsibilities. I can count the versions of myself like friend and foe. Mistakes are the detours that remind you of the true way, Saint. To love and be loved is more than can ever be expected, more than enough for a thousand ordinary lifetimes.”
― Chris Whitaker, All the Colors of the Dark

“Sitting on my balcony one night, sipping a cold beer and watching the bats circling over the rhododendrons, I let myself feel the weight I had carried with me all my life, that I had run from, humming under the surface. It was a feeling of worthlessness, a deep-seated shame. In that moment I was at the same time a recognized, celebrated thirty-year-old international TV correspondent and a little girl hiding under the stairs from her parents and incapable of loving herself. I knew well how to escape this feeling—head out on a plane, to a place with no cell service, a place where I didn’t really belong—but this time I would not. I would sit there and feel it. And it didn’t kill me. Those months felt like a cease-fire. A fragile peace emerged. Even my plants began to survive.”
― Jane Ferguson, No Ordinary Assignment: A Memoir

“And that I fantasised about him more than I had about any man in all my life. Even Tom Hardy. Even. Tom. Hardy.”
― Caroline Peckham, Cursed Fates