Mariel

“Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters.”
― Camille Paglia

“old-fashioned flowers, it looked like an English garden.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Swans of Fifth Avenue

“The New York of the plays, the movies, the books; the New York of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair and Vogue. It was a beacon, a spire, a beacon on top of a spire. A light, always glowing from afar, visible even from the cornfields of Iowa, the foothills of the Dakotas, the deserts of California. The swamps of Louisiana. Beckoning, always beckoning. Summoning the discontented, seducing the dreamers. Those whose blood ran too hot, and too quickly, causing them to look about at their placid families, their staid neighbors, the graves of their slumbering ancestors and say— I’m different. I’m special. I’m more. They all came to New York.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Swans of Fifth Avenue

“In my work, I see couples who no longer wait for an invitation into their partner's interiority, but instead demand admittance, as if they are entitled to unrestricted access into the private thoughts of their loved ones”
― Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic