#aught

Ugly and ungainly. The least dependable creature you ever met. Just when you think you understand her, she changes. If only I had a son," he said bitterly. Over and over he disparaged her, and George would have thought that Beatrice would be so used to it, she could not be hurt further. But he saw her neck grow stiffer and stiffer. ↗

— Mette Ivie Harrison

#father #feelings #hurt #king #princess

You should think about your character. Know where you are changing, how you will be changed, what cannot be changed back again. ↗

— Amy Tan

#change

Users of clichés frequently have more sinister intentions beyond laziness and conventional thinking. Relabelling events often entails subtle changes of meaning. War produces many euphemisms, downplaying or giving verbal respectability to savagery and slaughter. ↗

— Patrick Cockburn

#conventional-thinking #euphemism #language #laziness #savagery

Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter? ↗

— Neil Postman

#dystopia #laughter #media #age

I remember I laughed so hard I cried. But my response was half appropriate, because I was at a funeral. 
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#cry #crying #death #funeral #inappropriate

Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#life

When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing. ↗

— Sherman Alexie

#death #grief #laughter #p- #death

Aware that his disappointment has its source in a defective education, he looks with anxiety on his other daughters, whose minds, like lovely buds, are beginning to open. Where shall he find a genial soil in which he may place them to expand? ↗

— Emma Willard

#aware #beginning #buds #daughters #defective

You laugh as you sing about dying, you drug yourself up, but you can still see clearly, and you die as you break into a fit of laughter, because asi es la vida in this soup of islands stewed in hunger and the desire to be someone else. ↗

— Mayra Santos-Febres

#drugs #laughter #death

The sudden loss of her father was like living with a wound that would never heal, yet her memories of him were fading more and more every day. ↗

— Frank Beddor

#daughter #death #father #loss #memories