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“Being sick is supposed to come along with grand realizations about What Really Matters, but I don't know. I think deep down, we're already aware of what's important and what's not. Which isn't to say that we always live our lives accordingly. We snap at our spouses and curse the traffic and miss the buds pushing up from the ground. But we know. We just forget to know sometimes.

Near-death forces us to remember. It pushes us into a state of aggressive gratitude that throws what's big and what's small into the sharpest relief. It's awfully hard to worry about the puddle of milk when you're just glad to be here to spill it.

Aggressive gratitude, though, is no way to live. It's too easy. We're meant to work at these things. To strive to know. Our task is to seek out what's essential, get distracted by the fluff, and still know, feel annoyed by annoyances, and find our way back. The so-called small stuff actually matters very much. It's what we push against on our way to figuring out how much we wish to think and be. We need that dialectic, and illness snatches it away. A stubbed toe, a too-long line at the post office, these things and the fluster they bring are signifiers of a healthy life, and I craved them.”
― Jessica Fechtor, Stir: My Broken Brain and the Meals That Brought Me Home

“For my mother’s entire life, her mother was less a mother than splintered bits of shrapnel she carried around in her body, sharp, rusty debris that threatened to puncture an organ if she turned a certain way.”
― Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion

“At times he was very unhappy, but for a long time we thought that he would be cured of this unhappiness when he decided to become an adult; his unhappiness seemed like that of a boy—the absent-minded, voluptuous melancholy of a boy who has not yet got his feet on the ground and who lives in the sterile, solitary world of his dreams.”
― Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues

“Food has powers. It picks us up from our lonely corners and sits us back down, together. It pulls us out of ourselves, to the kitchen, to the table, to the diner down the block. At the same time, it draws us inward. Food is the keeper of our memories, connecting us with our pasts and with our people.”
― Jessica Fechtor, Stir: My Broken Brain and the Meals That Brought Me Home