Sara

“When I was living alone in Montreal, heartbroken over a lost love, she sent me a quote from Paul Valéry. One word per letter, though, so it took me months to figure out. Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm… you will triumph.”
― Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows

“Lust rubied my blood, gave me the gait of an uncaught criminal, and I felt like I could walk forever.”
― Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

“As we have so often seen, the task of ego consciousness in the second half of life is to step out of the way and embrace a larger spiritual agenda. Contrary to the fantasy of the youthful ego, this larger life will quite often be found in the savannahs of suffering—not on the lofty peaks of New Age transcendence, or in fundamentalism’s fearful flight from complexity, but down in what Yeats called “the fury and mire of human veins.” Only in this way do we grow, and do we find, amid suffering and defeat, the possibility of meaning so rich we can scarcely bear it. For this embrace of suffering, this acceptance of paradox, we deserve to be valued. As Jung put it so aptly, “This apparently unendurable conflict is proof of the rightness of your life. A life without inner contradiction is only half a life, or else a life in the Beyond which is destined only for angels. But God loves human beings more than the angels.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“I remember being scared that something must, surely, go wrong, if we were this happy, her and me, in the early days, when our love was settling into the shape of our lives like cake mixture reaching the corners of the tin as it swells and bakes.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers