Emma

“What are you watching? Is it comforting? I don’t have the bandwidth to give a fuck about anything not comforting to me most of the time. I know that’s “uncultured,” but also I don’t care because who are you, person challenging me? I want to watch Veep before bed because it makes me laugh, and I want to watch true crime documentaries, and I want to watch British actors in terrific costumes battling through emotions they weren’t even aware they had. That’s all. I’m tired. Find your comforting shit. Build your mental fort and hang out there.”
― Anne T. Donahue, Nobody Cares

“The flayed landscape of the western prairie does little to remind the people who live there of the covenant of works or the covenant or grace. The sky, visible right down to the horizon, has a diminishing effect upon everything in the foreground, and the distance is as featureless and remote as the possibility of punishment for slander. The roads run straight, with death and old age intersecting at right angles, and the harvest is stored in cemeteries.”
― William Maxwell, Time Will Darken It

“Sarah wondered what it could be like, to live like this - life as a country dance, where everything is lovely, and graceful, and ordered, and every single turn is preordained, and not a foot may be set outside the measure. Not like Sarah's own out-in-all-weathers haul and trudge, the wind howling and blustery, the creeping flowers in the hedgerows, the sudden sunshine.”
― Jo Baker, Longbourn

“What I really meant to write to you about today was to tell you that I read your learned and technical and I am sure admirable denouncements of Walt Whitman with a respectful attention due to so much earnestness; and when I had done, and wondered awhile pleasantly at the amount of time for letter-writing the Foreign Office allows its young men, I stretched myself, and got my hat, and went down to the river; and I sat at the water's edge in the middle of a great many buttercups; and there was a little wind; and the little wind knocked the heads of the buttercups together; and it seemed to amuse them, or else something else did, for I do assure you I thought I heard them laugh.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther