Meredith Melrose

“He had no heart. And, you know, a man who gives up his heart is little better than a tin can...and all the Baum's Castorine in the world couldn't make him better. That's why he was so determined to find one. Sometimes, when the tin woodman leaves home, when he goes on the road, leaving his family to sell his chopped wood, he feels so hollow he bangs on his chest, just to hear the echo inside. That's what it's like to be a man of tin. It's very lonely.”
― Elizabeth Letts, Finding Dorothy

“There was no good name for this spot. Evie, who had shot like an arrow from school into life, who had never wavered, who had seen clear right from the start where she wanted to get to, had lately found herself more and more in the brambles. Somehow, here she was, no longer certain where she was going. Or even if she wanted to get there.

The jobs had been won, the beds made, the dishes washed, the children sprouted. The wheel had stopped, and now what? Where, for instance, was the story of a middle-aged orphan with the gray streak in her hair, the historian who had rustled thirteenth-century women's lives out of fugitive pages, who believed more than most that there was no such thing as the certainty of a plot in the story of a life, in fact who taught this to students year in and year our, and yet who found herself lately longing, above all else for just that? Longing, against reason, for some kind of clear direction, for the promise of a pattern. For this relief--she pulled against the shoulder strap of her satchel--the unbearable relief of an omniscient narrator.

Adolescence, she reflected, pushing open the classroom door with a kind of savage glee, had nothing on this.”
― Sarah Blake, The Guest Book

“People don't grow where they're planted; they grow where they're loved. Knowing things about the Bible is terrific. But I'd trade in a dozen Bible studies for a bucket full of love and acceptance--and truth be told, so would everyone around us.”
― Bob Goff, Everybody, Always: Becoming Love in a World Full of Setbacks and Difficult People

“It takes a while to figure out who you are as an introverted mother, who you are as a person now that the lifelong job of raising children has forever altered your identity.”
― Jamie C. Martin, Introverted Mom: Your Guide to More Calm, Less Guilt, and Quiet Joy