Ruby

“No engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine-tuned as an anus. To call someone an asshole is really bragging him up.”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“Grief is subversive, undermining the quiet agreement to behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small. There is something feral about grief, something essentially outside the ordained and sanctioned behaviors of our culture. Because of that, grief is necessary to the vitality of the soul. Contrary to our fears, grief is suffused with life-force.... It is not a state of deadness or emotional flatness. Grief is alive, wild, untamed and cannot be domesticated. It resists the demands to remain passive and still. We move in jangled, unsettled, and riotous ways when grief takes hold of us. It is truly an emotion that rises from the soul.”
― Francis Weller

“When happiness hits us, we all want to cling to it as tightly and as mercilessly as possible. We want to capture it and hold it between our palms forever, not realising that we have to let it go for it to mean anything at all. That we have to keep moving onward, facing forward, steering constantly into the fearful and unknown, that all the best moments of our lives are still waiting for us on the other side. When we have to leave the things we love behind, we are allowed to mourn them, to miss them, to look back on them dejectedly and sadly. But we must never, ever forget that the best days of our lives are not all behind us, that there are more wonderful things awaiting us in the future than we could ever even fathom. That so many of our happiest days are still ahead. That we have to keep moving to get there. No matter how tempting that view in the rear view mirror is. The future we want will not arrive without our participation. And in order to get there, we have to blindly and blissfully trust that it is going to be somewhere indescribably worth going.”
― Heidi Priebe, This Is Me Letting You Go

“I am not, for all my frustration, opposed to capitalism. Most Americans, poor ones included, aren’t. We like the idea that anyone can succeed. What I am opposed to is the sort of capitalism that sucks the life out of a whole bunch of the citizenry and then demands that they do better with whatever they have left. If we could just agree that poor people are doing the necessary grunt work and that there is dignity in that too, we’d be able to make it less onerous.”
― Linda Tirado, Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America