Sharon

“Her ideas were expressions of her inability to accept her own personal tragedy and her quest for some certainty on which she could rest a troubled spirit. Her her lack of education was a real handicap, because she had no historical or philosophical perspective from which to analyze her own experience of grief and loss. Because we lived in a cultural wasteland of suburbia, there were no schools or evening classes she might have attended which could offer an intellectually disciplined approach to her quest. Nor were there any churches which might have offered comfort through the beauty of their liturgy.”
― Jill Ker Conway, The Road from Coorain

“...and, of course, for the final blessing, the one that carries within it all the colors of the rainbow, May God make you good, for I have done what I could, and it won't be so much because of any additional goodness that God, as subject as any ordinary mortal to lapses and oversights, may contribute to crown my efforts, but because of a humble awareness that the reason we didn't do any better was simply because we couldn't. Arguing with what must be has always been a waste of time...”
― José Saramago, The Cave

“There’s no spirit or soul. I will be dead. Get that through your thick head. I’ll be dead. And I live, in quotation marks, in my children, in my DNA, in my books, in my reputation. It’s as simple as that.”
― Edwin Shneidman

“I won't even mention the swift, transitory reward of lemon spray wax. Danielle Westerman and I have discussed the matter of housework. Not surprisingly, she, always looking a little dérisoire, believes that women have been enslaved by their possessions. Acquiring and then tending--these eat up a woman's creativity, anyone's creativity. But I've been watching the ways she arranges articles on a shelf, and how carefully she sets a table, even with it is just me coming into Toronto to have lunch in her sunroom.”
― Carol Shields, Unless