Jane

“I am often tired. I am sometimes discouraged. I am always sure.”
― Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter

“When we speak today, then, about 'holy wedded matrimony,' or 'the sanctity of marriage,' we would do well to remember that for approximately 10 centuries, Christianity itself did not see marriage as being either holy or sanctified. Marriage was certainly not modeled as the ideal state of moral being. On the contrary, the early Christian fathers regarded the habit of marriage as a somewhat repugnant worldly affair that had everything to do with sex and females and taxes and property, and nothing whatsoever to do with higher concerns of divinity. So when modern day religious conservatives wax nostalgic about how marriage is a sacred tradition that reaches back into history for thousands of uninterrupted years, they are absolutely correct, but in only one respect: only if they happen to be talking about Judaism. Christianity simply does not share that deep and consistent historical reverence toward matrimony. Lately it has, yes, but not originally. For the first thousand or so years of Christian history, the church regarded monogamous marriage as marginally less wicked than flat-out whoring, but only very marginally.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert

“I felt sad, happy, content.”
― Akhil Sharma, Family Life

“I longed for release from whatever it was I was. But whatever I was lay hard and immovable in me, like bone; I would never be free of my own weight.”
― Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter