Kris Dersch

“...[M]ost of us have figured out that we have to do what's in front of us and keep doing it. We clean up beaches after oil spills. We rebuild whole towns after hurricanes and tornadoes. We return calls and library books. We get people water. Some of us even pray. Every time we choose the good action or response, the decent, the valuable, it builds, incrementally, to renewal, resurrection, the place of newness, freedom, justice. The equation is: life, death, resurrection, hope. The horror is real, and so you make casseroles for your neighbor, organize an overseas clothing drive, and do your laundry. You can also offer to do other people's laundry if they have recently had any random babies or surgeries.
We live stitch by stitch, when we're lucky. If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching. And maybe the stitching is crude, or it is unraveling, but if it were precise, we'd pretend that life was just fine and running like a Swiss watch. That's not helpful if on the inside our understanding is that life is more often a cuckoo clock with rusty gears.”
― Anne Lamott, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope, and Repair

“Some people spend all their time on a vacation taking pictures so that when they get home they can show their friends evidence that they had a good time. They don’t pause to let the vacation enter inside of them and take that home.”
― E.L. Konigsburg, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler

“Childhood is not the happiest time of one's life, but only to a child is pure happiness possible.”
― A.A. Milne, It's Too Late Now: The Autobiography of a Writer

“I seemed to really like people who really liked books. I wondered what that said about me.”
― Amy Rebecca Tan, Summer at Meadow Wood