Jeanne Cunningham

“Or the quaking misgivings that infected every step forward, after a loss. Even now, dread still struck her down sometimes if she found herself counting on things being fine. Meaning her now-living children and their future, those things. She had so much more to lose now than just herself or her own plans. If Ovid Byron was torn up over butterflies, he should see how it felt to look past a child’s baby teeth into this future world he claimed was falling apart. Like poor Job lying on the ash heap wailing, cutting his flesh with a husk. That’s where love could take you.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior

“Ninety-year-old Irving Fradkin, an optometrist from Fall River, Massachusetts, who started a grass-roots scholarship fund, flanked by a dozen grateful kids among the hundreds of thousands he’d sent to college.”
― Katie Couric, Going There

“Toward midafternoon, as the heat closed in like a hand over a murder victim’s mouth, the city thrashed and twisted, but with its outcry muffled, its hurry hampered, its ambitions hindered, it was like a dry fountain, some useless monument, and so sank into a coma. The steaming willow-limp stretches of Central Park were like a battlefield where many have fallen: rows of exhausted casualties lay crumpled in the dead-still shade, while newspaper photographers, documenting the disaster, moved sepulchrally among them. At night, hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain and its central nerves, which sizzle like the inside of an electric-light bulb.”
― Truman Capote, Portraits and Observations