after all, girls are taught to be polite and accommodating. Being rude or blunt would be a display of bad manners. Historically, women have ignored their instincts, alerting them to danger because they don’t want to overreact or, God
...more
“I knew without doubt that my mother’s death had irrevocably altered who I was and who I would become. When a parent dies young, explains Maxine Harris, PhD, in The Loss That Is Forever, children have a personal encounter with death that influences the way they see the world for the rest of their lives. “Some events are so big and so powerful that they cannot help but change everything they touch,” she writes. How could all my thoughts and feelings, then, not be traced back to the event that had created such a jagged fault line through my history, dividing it into a permanent Before and After?”
― Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss
― Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss
“When a daughter loses a mother, the intervals between grief responses lengthen over time, but her longing never disappears. It always hovers at the edge of her awareness, ready to surface at any time, in any place, in the least expected ways. This isn’t pathological. It’s normal. It’s why you find yourself, at twenty-four, or thirty-five or forty-three, unwrapping a present or walking down an aisle or crossing a busy street, doubled over and missing your mother”
― Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss
― Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss
“about 80 percent of all crime is committed by 20 percent of the criminals.”
― Repeat Offender: Sin City's Most Prolific Criminal and the Cop Who Caught Him
― Repeat Offender: Sin City's Most Prolific Criminal and the Cop Who Caught Him
“She’d known some no-good men and reported on many more. Nearly every case she covered involved a no-good man who felt that the world or a woman had wronged him somehow. But no matter what he’d done, she’d yet to meet a no-good man who thought of himself as the villain.”
― Broadway Butterfly
― Broadway Butterfly
“My grief fills rooms. It takes up space and it sucks out the air. It leaves no room for anyone else. Grief and I are left alone a lot. We smoke cigarettes and we cry. We stare out the window at the Chrysler Building twinkling in the distance, and we trudge through the cavernous rooms of the apartment like miners aimlessly searching for a way out . . . Grief is possessive and doesn’t let me go anywhere without it. I drag my grief out to restaurants and bars, where we sit together sullenly in the corner, watching everyone carry on around us. I take grief shopping with me, and we troll up and down the aisles of the supermarket, both of us too empty to buy much. Grief takes showers with me, our tears mingling with the soapy water, and grief sleeps next to me, its warm embrace like a sedative keeping me under for long, unnecessary hours. Grief is a force and I am swept up in it.”
― Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss
― Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss
Gena’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Gena’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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