Dkattean

“I have never been one of those people—I know you aren’t, either—who feels that the love one has for a child is somehow a superior love, one more meaningful, more significant, and grander than any other. I didn’t feel that before Jacob, and I didn’t feel that after. But it is a singular love, because it is a love whose foundation is not physical attraction, or pleasure, or intellect, but fear. You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what tricks us into thinking that it is more magnificent, because the fear itself is more magnificent. Every day, your first thought is not “I love him” but “How is he?” The world, overnight, rearranges itself into an obstacle course of terrors. I would hold him in my arms and wait to cross the street and would think how absurd it was that my child, that any child, could expect to survive this life. It seemed as improbable as the survival of one of those late-spring butterflies—you know, those little white ones—I sometimes saw wobbling through the air, always just millimeters away from smacking itself against a windshield.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“We are all drowning slowly in the tide of our opinions, oblivious that we are taking on water every time we open our mouths.”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“Coal, with time and heat and pressure, will always become a diamond. But if you were freezing to death, which would you consider the gem?”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“Fair are the daughters of men, and fairest are those who read.”
― James K. Morrow, The Philosopher's Apprentice