Nora

“There are days when I feel so lightly connected to the earth that the threads that tether me to the planet are gossamer thin, spun sugar. A strong gust of wind could dislodge me completely, and I’d lift off and blow away, like one of those seeds in a dandelion clock. The threads tighten slightly from Monday to Friday.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“Because while it surely felt cathartic to see it all laid bare, even briefly, the view did not undo the damage. We could not go back in time and have the story of Hillary Clinton be written by people who had not also pressed their erections into the shoulders of young women who’d worked for them. We could not retroactively resituate the women who’d left jobs and whole careers because the navigation of the risks, of the daily abuses, drove them out. We would not see the movies or the art that those women would have made, could not live by the laws that they might have enacted, could not read the news as they might have reported it, had they ever truly had a fair shake at getting to tell it their way. The tsunami of #metoo stories hadn’t just revealed the way that men had grabbed and rubbed and punished and shamed women; it had also shown us that they had done it all while building the very world in which we still were forced to live.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath. Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“But feeling better would not mean the loss was less real, only less raw and exposed. Instead of being on my skin, my grief would seep through my pores and adhere to my heart and lungs, to my blood and guts. And now I had to figure out how to live like that, how to behave like a normal, sane person, a person who was not haunted.”
― Jennifer McGaha, Flat Broke with Two Goats