Eleanor

“Mind you do think. Don't just take out your feelings and look at them, which is what passes for thought with most of us pitiful, self-centred creatures. Look at the question from everyone's point of view.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, A City of Bells

“We're Englishmen. For us the road always goes home again.”
― James Meek, To Calais, In Ordinary Time

“God has a dream for me? I say. I love that idea. It sounds like a Disney movie.

I know, Margaret says. Her pale round face opens up. Everybody uses the phrase God's will or plan. That has a neo-Nazi ring to it.

I like the Disney version.

I feel you, she says, and I sit for a minute silently disbelieving she's a nun. She adjusts her heavy glasses, and her eyes once again magnify.

Let's eat a cookie and pray for each other's disordered attachments, she says. Mine involves pride and cookies.

Mine, I say, involves pride and good-looking men.

Together we bow our heads.”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“She was so sure, so completely certain, as she entered any room, of her power, of her contribution to the sum of beauty in the world. And yet she had always been vulnerable too, wounded by the smallest slight, and turned into a pathetic self-doubting creature by such a nothing as a kind word left unsaid, or a sum she could not add.”
― Hermione Eyre, Viper Wine