Bren

“If you’re the very luckiest kind of astronaut ever, your big payoff is that you get to visit a barren airless wasteland for five minutes, do some more math, and then go home—ice cream not guaranteed.”
― Lindy West, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

“Life is either getting a hand or giving a hand. Usually it’s both at the same time. ”
― Molly McAleer, The Alcoholic Bitch Who Ruined Your Life: Stories About Love, Death and Rehab

“I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and took a walk around the house. Alex’s mother cat just had a batch of baby kittens and I sat on the porch and just kept looking at them. It was a revelation! Without drugs! Without anything but kittens whose fur is like all the softness in the world put together. It was so soft that when I closed my eyes I wasn’t sure I was even touching it, I put the little gray one, named Happiness, up to my ear, and felt the warmth in her tiny body and listened to her incredible purring. Then she tried to nurse my ear and the feeling in me was so big I thought I was going to break wide open. It was better than a drug trip, a thousand times better, a million times, a trillion times. These things are real! The softness was not a hallucination; the sounds of the night, the cars swishing by, the crickets. I was really there. I heard it! I saw it and I felt it and that’s the way I want life to always be! And that’s the way it will be!”
― Beatrice Sparks, Go Ask Alice

“reasonableness and positivity can feel like a kind of bullying.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, Mothers, Tell Your Daughters: Stories