Kari

“Rachel and I, we’d been raised to do what we wanted to do, and we had; we’d been successful, and we’d shown everyone. We didn’t need to wear apocryphal T-shirts because we already knew the secret, which was this: that when you did succeed, when you did outearn and outpace, when you did exceed all expectations, nothing around you really shifted. You still had to tiptoe around the fragility of a man, which was okay for the women who got to shop and drink martinis all day—this was their compensation; they had done their own negotiations—but was absolutely intolerable for anyone who was out there working and getting respect and becoming the person that others had to tiptoe around. That these men could be so delicate, that they could lack any inkling of self-examination when it came time to try to figure out why their women didn’t seem to be batshit enthusiastic over another night of bolstering and patting and fellating every insecurity out of them—this was the thing we’d find intolerable.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble

“People are lonely, is my point here. Many people can’t say to those they know well what it is they feel they might want to say.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Oh William!

“I could not believe I was sitting in the sky and had to act nonchalant about it. I tried to . But it was astonishing!

Lucy Barton's first flight”
― Elizabeth Strout, Oh William!

“To deny my husband any chance of comforting me—oh, it was an unspeakably awful thing. And I had not known. This is the way of life: the many things we do not know until it is too late.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Oh William!