Anne Secher

“She grows up feeling wrong, out of place, too dark, too tall, too unruly, too opinionated, too silent, too strange. She grows up with the awareness that she is merely tolerated, an irritant useless, that she does not deserve love, that she will need to change herself substantially, crush herself down if she is to be married. She grows up, too, with the memory of what it meant to be properly loved, for what you are, not what you ought to be.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet

“It took me a long time to
realize that life isn’t about feeling the pain of others but understanding
the pain they are going through and why.”
― Jude Morrow, Why Does Daddy Always Look So Sad?: A Memoir

“Why does it always happen that just when I begin to feel life simply couldn't get any better, fate drops a disaster into my path to prove me right?”
― Dianne Freeman, A Lady's Guide to Mischief and Murder

“Trying to keep up appearances over the many years had become so exhausting that I often retreated to the safe place I had created in my mind.”
― Jude Morrow, Why Does Daddy Always Look So Sad?: A Memoir