Sarah

“In politics, she’d discovered that so few systems worked—but libraries did. The world was not yet wholly bereft of things to believe in.”
― Kerry Clare, Waiting for a Star to Fall

“In 1900, George and Clara Morris and their four children, Samuel, Selma, Marcella, and Malvina, left Bucharest, Romania, and boarded a ship for New York City. When they arrived in the United States, they stayed in New York City for a few weeks and then decided to move to Los Angeles, where George wanted to become a director in the movie business. Along the way, in St. Louis, Clara had another baby and died in childbirth. George put the children in an orphanage there before heading on to Los Angeles, where he promised to send for them. The children stayed in the orphanage until the oldest child, Marcella, was able to make enough money to get them all out. She moved them back to New York City, where she became the first Jewish female to hold a seat on the Wall Street stock exchange, where she made millions of dollars that she later gave to Brandeis University. She lived with her sisters in an apartment on Charles Street in Greenwich Village and had a house in Southampton, New York, and somewhere along the way had an affair with J. P. Morgan. Interesting? You bet. But don’t worry about remembering any of this, because it’s 90 percent wrong, which I didn’t find out until years later.”
― Julie Klam, The Almost Legendary Morris Sisters: A True Story of Family Fiction

“Money poisons you when you’ve got it, and starves you when you haven’t.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“Mina Foi’s finger zipped out and collected a stray sliver of fried onion that lay upon the tablecloth, and she put the sliver in her mouth with an absent-minded expression, not glancing about to see if anyone had spotted her because if nobody sees you, you didn’t do what you did. She was brimful of sadness for no particular reason, just a poignancy, a melancholy that comes from eating such royal food when your life is so very empty, when there is austerity in all matters save dinner.”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny