In my mother’s living room, the brief day is shuttered, sky waning to ambient light, when the arbitrary murmurs coalesce, a melody in a minor key. Someone thrusts a prayer book into my clenched hands.
“Becoming a mother is already a rupturing event—an apocalypse of the heart, an undoing and a redoing of your world. In loving Fiona, my heart broke open. There was a certain kind of agony in this—one for which I’m eternally grateful.”
― Raising a Rare Girl
― Raising a Rare Girl
“And if we are to suspend our secular beliefs, even for half a paragraph, we can imagine the migrated souls of all the human ancestors presently at table, looking over their bloodline progeny gathered together over the familiarity of cabbage and fried rice and the unfamiliarity of a meat disk between two circular pieces of bread, happy as parents in a playground when all of the children assembled play together quietly and at peace, and no one’s young feelings are hurt, and everyone will go home still innocent.”
― Our Country Friends
― Our Country Friends
“Everyone knows how women soldier on, how women dream up blueprints, recipes, ideas for a better world, and then sometimes lose them on the way to the crib in the middle of the night, on the way to the Stop & Shop, or the bath. They lose them on the way to greasing the path on which their husband and children will ride serenely through life.”
― The Wife
― The Wife
The Modern Library 100 Best Novels Challenge
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