Barbara

“You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to
wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.”
― Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird

“Every life deserves a certain amount of dignity, no matter how poor or damaged the shell that carries it.”
― Rick Bragg, All Over But the Shoutin'

“Touch. It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By touch we are betrayed and betray others ... an accidental brushing of shoulders or touching of hands ... hands laid on shoulders in a gesture of comfort that lies like a thief, that takes, not gives, that wants, not offers, that awakes, not pacifies. When one flesh is waiting, there is electricity in the merest contact.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose