Ashley

“Since I was a small girl, I have lived inside this cottage, shelted by its roof and walls. I have known of people suffering—I have not been blind to them in the way that privilege allows, the way my own husband and now my daughter are blind. It is a statement of fact and not a judgement to say Charlie and Ella’s minds aren’t oriented in that direction; in a way, it absolves them, whereas the unlucky have knocked on the door of my consciousness, they have emerged from the forest and knocked many times over the course of my life, and I have only occasionally allowed them entry. I’ve done more than nothing and much less than I could have. I have laid inside, beneath a quilt on a comfortable couch, in a kind of reverie, and when I heard the unlucky outside my cottage, sometimes I passed them coins or scraps of food, and sometimes I ignored them altogether; if I ignored them, they had no choice but to walk back into the woods, and when they grew weak or got lost or were circled by wolves, I pretended I couldn’t hear them calling my name.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, American Wife

“I looked at my palms trying to see the other life, the parallel life. The point at which my selves broke away and one married a fat man and the other stayed here.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit