Gwen

“This is what comes of having a heart, even a very small and young one. It causes no end of trouble, and that’s the truth.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

“See how the lights twinkle?” Patrick pointed at the horizon. He held on tight to Grant, who he imagined felt even further from Sara; Maisie, after all, had nine years with her mother, while her brother only had six. “They’re not actually flickering, not really. The lights themselves are static. It’s all the things we cannot see between us and them that make them shimmer. Atmospheric densities, dust, moisture, humidity, that sort of thing. I’m not really the expert. But all the invisible things. Like your mom, she’s one of them now, too. When she starts to feel far away, I like to imagine she’s not as far away as we might think. She’s right here between us and the lights.”
― Steven Rowley, The Guncle Abroad

“For there are two kinds of forgiveness in the world: the one you practice because everything really is all right, and what went before is mended. The other kind of forgiveness you practice because someone needs desperately to be forgiven, or because you need just as badly to forgive them, for a heart can grab hold of old wounds and go sour as milk over them.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

“There’s a magnet that somebody stuck on the refrigerator in our office’s kitchen: PEACE. IT DOES NOT MEAN TO BE IN A PLACE WHERE THERE IS NO NOISE, TROUBLE, OR HARD WORK. IT MEANS TO BE IN THE MIDST OF THOSE THINGS AND STILL BE CALM IN YOUR HEART. We can help patients find peace, but maybe a different kind than they imagined they’d find when they started treatment. As the late psychotherapist John Weakland famously said, “Before successful therapy, it’s the same damn thing over and over. After successful therapy, it’s one damn thing after another.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed