Anders Munk-Nielsen

“So many nights, exhausted or just impatient, I have been eager for my children’s bedtime. One kid’s chatter barely registers in my ear because it’s the same chatter I’ve been hearing all day. The other kid’s chain of requests for a sip of water, to be tucked in (again), for another sip of water, to turn the hallway light on, feels like fingernails on a chalkboard. Minutes later, as I peak into their room and see that they have each fallen into slumber, I see all sweetness and splendor in their faces. I want to lie down and hold them close. I wonder what that last bit of chatter was that I tuned out. Whether it was something important about my child’s world. A tiny voice echoes in my head, “can I please have another sip of water?” And I hear it more clearly now as “It makes me feel secure and cared for when you bring it to me.” Their care and wellbeing matter more to me than anything and I feel at a cellular level the honor and joy of being their mom. Now that they’re asleep.”
― Molly Millwood, To Have and to Hold: Motherhood, Marriage, and the Modern Dilemma

“There’s a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“Yet each disappointment Ted felt in his wife, each incremental deflation, was accompanied by a seizure of guilt; many years ago, he had taken the passion he felt for Susan and folded it in half, so he no longer had a drowning, helpless feeling when he glimpsed her beside him in bed: her ropy arms and soft, generous ass. Then he’d folded it in half again, so when he felt desire for Susan, it no longer brought with it an edgy terror of never being satisfied. Then in half again, so that feeling desire entailed no immediate need to act. Then in half again, so he hardly felt it. His desire was so small in the end that Ted could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it, and this gave him a feeling of safety and accomplishment, of having dismantled a perilous apparatus that might have crushed them both. Susan was baffled at first, then distraught; she’d hit him twice across the face; she’d run from the house in a thunderstorm and slept at a motel; she’d wrestled Ted to the bedroom floor in a pair of black crotchless underpants. But eventually a sort of amnesia had overtaken Susan; her rebellion and hurt had melted away, deliquesced into a sweet, eternal sunniness that was terrible in the way that life would be terrible, Ted supposed, without death to give it gravitas and shape. He’d presumed at first that her relentless cheer was mocking, another phase in her rebellion, until it came to him that Susan had forgotten how things were between them before Ted began to fold up his desire; she’d forgotten and was happy — had never not been happy — and while all of this bolstered his awe at the gymnastic adaptability of the human mind, it also made him feel that his wife had been brainwashed. By him.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Leo Tolstoy , Anna Karenina