Words To Live By

"You never know.  You only guess.  This is how it always is.  You have to make these huge decisions on behalf of your kid, this tiny human whose fate and future is entirely in your hands, who trusts you to know what's good and right and then be able to make that happen.  You never have enough information.  You don't get to see the future.  And if you screw up, if with your incomplete contradictory information you make the wrong call, well, nothing less than your child's entire future and happiness is at stake.  It's impossible.  It's heartbreaking.  It's maddening.  But there's no alternative."
This is How it Always is - Laurie Frankel

...
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

-- Mary Oliver, "The Summer Day"

Favorite Quotes

Picture

"We're all insecure...and then some people are polite and some people are rude."  The Emperor's Children/Claire Messaud

What I've Read Lately:

State of Wonder
 by Anne Patchett

"She found a village of people in the Amazon, a tribe," Anders had said, "where the women go on bearing children until the end of their lives.  
Now there's a chilling thought."


We Are All Completely
Beside Ourselves
by Karen Joy Fowler
"But as far back as I could remember, I'd also been jealous of her.  I'd been jealous again, not fifteen minutes past, learning that Lowell's visit had been for her and not me.  ​But maybe this was the way sisters usually felt about one another."


The Wife
by Meg Wolitzer
"Joe once told me he felt a little sorry for women, who only got husbands.  Husbands tried to help by giving answers, being logical, stubbornly applying force as though it were a glue gun.  Or else they didn't try to help at all, for they were somewhere else entirely, out walking in the world by themselves.  But wives, oh wives, when they weren't being bitter or melancholy or counting the beads on their abacus of disappointment, they could take care of you with delicate and effortless ease."

The Ocean at the
End of the Lane
by Neil Gaiman
'"Grown-ups and monsters aren't scared of things.'
'Oh, monsters are scared,' said Lettie. 'That's why they're monsters.  And as for grown ups...I'm going to tell you something important.  Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either.  Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing.  Inside they look just like they always have.  Like they did when they were your age.  The truth is there aren't any grown-ups.  Not one, in the whole wide world."