Emily

“Wren saw now how passion was delicate and temporary, a visitor, a feeling that would come and go. Feelings fled under pressure; feelings did not light the darkness. What remained strong in the deep, the hard times, was love as an effort, a doing, a conscious act of will. Soulmates, like her and Lewis, were not theoretical and found. They were tangible, built.”
― Emily Habeck, Shark Heart

“Women are born with all their eggs in their ovaries, like the seeds of a fruit. I'd been with my mother since she'd been in my grandmother's womb, and now I was sleeping in her bed and my mother was in the next room sleeping in her mother's. It made me think of us like Russian dolls. Women carried inside women carried inside women.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“If I could go back in time I'd make the same choice in a snap. And yet, there remains my sister life. All the other things I could have done instead. I wouldn't know what I couldn't know until I became a mom, and so I'm certain there are things I don't know because I can't know because I did. Who would I have nurtured had I not been nurturing my two children over these past seven years? In what creative and practical forces would my love have been gathered up? What didn't I write because I was catching my children at the bottoms of slides and spotting them as they balanced along the tops of low brick walls and pushing them endlessly in swings? What did I write because I did? Would I be happier and more intelligent and prettier if I had been free all this time to read in silence on a couch that sat opposite of Mr. Sugar's? Would I complain less? Has sleep deprivation and the consumption of an exorbitant number of Annie's Homegrown Organic Cheddar Bunnies taken years off my life or added years onto it? Who would I have met if I had bicycled across Iceland and hiked around Mongolia and what would I have experienced and where would that have taken me?

I'll never know, and neither will you of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“But nothing had really happened yet, I thought. What I'd lost, it seemed it was and would only ever be imaginary. What was I crying for, except the loss of one vision of what my life might have been, one I'd lived out in dreams? As all lovers learn, when love ends, you lose the future as well as the past.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt