Lorna

“Do not wait for people to be flawless before you allow yourself to adore them. Adore them anyway. (p. 169)”
― Katherine Rundell, Impossible Creatures

“His parents never talked about how they met, but when Park was younger, he used to try to imagine it.

He loved how much they loved each other. It was the thing he thought about when he woke up scared in the middle of the night. Not that they loved him--they were his parents, they had to love him. That they loved each other. They didn't have to do that.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park

“Of course I work,” she said. “I’m a mom.” But I was a mom, too, so what was what I did called?) But also: No one had to tell me it was harder to have a job and be a mother. It was obvious. It was two full-time occupations. It’s just math. Because having a job made you no less of a mother; you still had to do all that shit, too. Keeping track of your kids from afar isn’t easier. Entrusting them to a stranger who was available for babysitting by virtue of the fact that she was incapable of doing anything else is not something that fills a person with faith and relaxation. Now that I have worked and stayed at home, I can confirm all of this. Now that I stay at home, I can say it out loud. But now that I don’t work, no one is listening. No one listens to stay-at-home mothers, which, I guess, is why we were so careful about their feelings in the first place.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble

“To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole;”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch