katherines

“An acquaintance merely enjoys your company, a fair-weather companion flatters when all is well, a true friend has your best interests at heart and the pluck to tell you what you need to hear.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

“We are not called to fight the battles of our fathers with a blind faith. We are called to examine their wars, and moreover, to discern whether their actions were sinful or just. Furthermore, we are called to decide whether to correct the errors of our fathers battles through either peace, war, or some combination of the two. We are not bonded to our fathers' fate, but rather called to build on their trespasses or triumphs for a better future.”
― Cristina Marrero

“Maybe you can afford to wait. Maybe for you there's a tomorrow. Maybe for you there's one thousand tomorrows, or three thousand, or ten, so much time you can bathe in it, roll around it, let it slide like coins through you fingers. So much time you can waste it.
But for some of us there's only today. And the truth is, you never really know.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“And then, as slowly as the light fades on a calm winter evening, something went out of our relationship. I say that selfishly. Perhaps I started to look for something which had never been there in the first place: passion, romance. I aresay that as I entered my forties I had a sense that somehow life was going past me. I had hardly experienced those emotions which for me have mostly come from reading books or watching television. I suppose that if there was anything unsatisfactory in our marriage, it was in my perception of it—the reality was unchanged. Perhaps I grew up from childhood to manhood too quickly. One minute I was cutting up frogs in the science lab at school, the next I was working for the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence and counting freshwater mussel populations on riverbeds. Somewhere in between, something had passed me by: adolescence, perhaps? Something immature, foolish yet intensely emotive, like those favourite songs I had recalled dimly as if being played on a distant radio, almost too far away to make out the words. I had doubts, yearnings, but I did not know why or what for.
Whenever I tried to analyse our lives, and talk about it with Mary, she would say, ‘Darling, you are on the way to becoming one of the leading authorities in the world on caddis fly larvae. Don’t allow anything to deflect you from that. You may be rather inadequately paid, certainly compared with me you are, but excellence in any field is an achievement beyond value.’
I don’t know when we started drifting apart.
When I told Mary about the project—I mean about researching the possibility of a salmon fishery in the Yemen—something changed. If there was a defining moment in our marriage, then that was it. It was ironical, in a sense. For the first time in my life I was doing something which might bring me international recognition and certainly would make me considerably better off—I could live for years off the lecture circuit alone, if the project was even half successful.
Mary didn’t like it. I don’t know what part she didn’t like: the fact I might become more famous than her, the fact I might even become better paid than her. That makes her sound carping.”
― Paul Torday, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen