Kylene Jones

“Ideally, you should accept happiness as it comes, but happiness is the most relative of all emotions: no matter how happy you might be, the mind always swerves to other situations that could make you even happier;”
― S.M. Thayer, I Will Never Leave You

“My father had multiple affairs during the course of his marriage. A woman internalizes these things. A father’s infidelity teaches a girl that, ultimately, as a woman, she’s disposable. A mother’s silence about her husband’s infidelities teaches acceptance.”
― S.M. Thayer, I Will Never Leave You

“And that's the problem,' I say. 'Real macaroni and cheese doesn't come from a box, babe. It eventually comes from an oven with a crust bubbling on top.'
'Amen.' Seven holds his fist to me, and I bump it.
'Ohhh,' Chris says. 'You mean the kind with breadcrumbs?'
'What?' DeVante yells, and Seven goes, 'Breadcrumbs?'
'Nah,' I say. 'I mean there's like a crust of cheese on top. We gotta get you to a soul food restaurant, babe.'
'This fool said breadcrumbs.' DeVante sounds seriously offended. 'Breadcrumbs.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“The Second Noble Truth is more hopeful: suffering has an origin. Everything in this world is interdependent, linked in a great chain of cause and effect, so suffering must come from somewhere. Buddhists identify twelve links in this chain of “dependent origination” (pratitya-samutpada) but the key links are ignorance, thirst, and grasping. We suffer because we close our eyes to the way the world really is. We pretend we are independent when we are really interdependent. We pretend that changing things are unchanging. And we desperately desire the world and the people who populate it to be as we imagine it (and them) to be. And so we suffer when our spouses take up new interests, or when our favorite (and perfect just as it was) old-fashioned ice cream store puts up a ridiculous Web site with a stupid new logo, or when the brand new T-bird we are proudly driving home from the Ford dealership is hit by a rock thrown by a six-year-old kid who would go on to write this book (true story). We suffer because we desperately grasp after people, places, and things, as if they can redeem us from our suffering. We suffer because we cling to beliefs and judgments, not least beliefs in gods, and judgments that this friend or that enemy is morally bankrupt. Today “you have changed” is an explanation one lover gives to another as she is walking out the door. In Buddhism, “you have changed” is a description of what is happening every moment of every day. The”
― Stephen R. Prothero, God Is Not One: A Study of Religious Diversity and Doctrinal Differences