Jan Smith

“There aren’t many worse feelings than being lonely in a crowded room. We have never lived in a more connected world, yet loneliness is only increasing. We as a society must look at the value of these connections; a thousand Instagram followers aren’t worth as much as one person who you can communicate honestly and openly with, at least in my opinion.”
― Josiah Hartley, The Boy Between: A Mother and Son's Journey From a World Gone Grey

“Looking back, I think that maybe the whole thing about liking and loving isn’t that having one word is better, or worse, than having two. It’s more that, perhaps, we actually need loads more words. It’s that we really need so many words to properly describe all the different kinds of love that having one, or just two, is neither here nor there. Because there’s the love you feel for your mother, the woman who gave birth to you, who you depended on, and the love you feel for your father, and they are entirely different kinds of love. There’s the love you feel for a brother or sister, and the fierce protective – hurt them and I will kill you – love you feel for your kids. There’s love for friends, who make you laugh and feel good about yourself – and love for just about any other human you see suffering on the news. There’s romantic, sexy love, that makes you want to get so close that you end up making babies, and the inexplicable love you have for an old cat or dog you’ve had for years. My point is, I suppose, that the list just goes on and on. And somewhere in that rainbow list of things we don’t have words for there’s a special kind of hormone-swamped love that a mother feels for a man when she sees him curled protectively round her sleeping child. That one’s a particularly nice kind of love. And a bloody powerful one, too. FIVE”
― Nick Alexander, The Imperfection of Us

“He sat down and picked up a pen. He looked at the photograph of him and his brother just after they’d joined up, and words that had so long evaded his mouth now gathered at the nib of his pen, and he wrote down everything he felt and everything he could see. He wrote to Peace once a week between their courting, and what he couldn’t get down on paper that first week he continued into the second week, then the third. He wrote sitting on a harbour bench, he wrote at the tiller of his boat. Peace got to know her fisherman through his letters. And when they met up she made him read them out loud, so that the words that had gathered at the nib of his pen found their rightful place upon his tongue. 47”
― Sarah Winman, A Year of Marvellous Ways

“suffering from an avalanche of depression; we’re urged to stop sweating the small stuff, and yet we’re chronically anxious. I often wonder if these are just normal feelings that become monstrous when they’re denied. A great deal of life will always suck. There will be moments when we’re riding high, and moments when we can’t bear to get out of bed. Both are normal. Both, in fact, require a little perspective. Sometimes, the best response to our howls of anguish is the honest one: we need friends who wince along with our pain, who tolerate our gloom, and who allow us to be weak for a while when we’re finding our feet again. We need people who acknowledge that we can’t always hang on in there; that sometimes, everything breaks. Short of that, we need to perform those functions for ourselves: to give ourselves a break when we need it, and to be kind. To find our own grit, in our own time.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: How I learned to flourish when life became frozen