Shawn

“So blind we humans are—so blind. To each other and to ourselves, moving through life as though through shadows, putting out a hand in the dark and thinking we have touched someone. And maybe we have . . . But mostly we travel through life unsighted, grasping only the smallest details of one another’s selves, including our own. Thinking all the while that we can see.”
― Elizabeth Strout, The Things We Never Say

“The fact that Evelyn Peabody had tried to kill herself sat with Artie for the entire evening and into the next day. He thought of writing her a card: I know what that feels like. But in truth, he could not find within himself what it was exactly that he had felt when he had wanted to do such a thing. Though it did come to him, as he and Evie got ready for bed that night, that after the Merrills' party (which seems years ago now, though it had been only a few months) he had said to Evie when they came home -- he had said something like "Why don't people every say anything real?"

And now he knew why. Because to say anything real was to say things that nobody wanted to know. Or if they wanted to know, they would not care in the right way. Or even understand.

It was a private thing, to be alive. He understood this now.”
― Elizabeth Strout, The Things We Never Say

“Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way.”
― Martin Buber

“Because there’s nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline, no matter how many times it’s sent away.”
― Sarah Kay