#aught

She serves me a piece of it a few minutes out of the oven. A little steam rises from the slits on top. Sugar and spice - cinnamon - burned into the crust. But she's wearing these dark glasses in the kitchen at ten o'clock in the morning - everything nice - as she watches me break off a piece, bring it to my mouth, and blow on it. My daughter's kitchen, in winter. I fork the pie in and tell myself to stay out of it. She says she loves him. No way could it be worse. ↗

— Raymond Carver

#domestic-abuse #domestic-violence #family #fathers #love

I will always love my mother for who she is and everything she does. ↗

— Tammy-Louise Wilkins

#family #friends #love #mother #family

Darling Daddy, This is Rose. The shed needs new wires now it has blown up. Caddy is bringing home rock-bottom boyfriends to see if they will do for Mummy. Instead of you. Love, Rose. ↗

— Hilary McKay

#fathers-and-daughters #little-girl #notes #family

It was tragic how life had sucked her down to the bones, all her spontaneity her laughter and freedom had vanished. I knew then that I didn't ever want to be like that. Whatever happened, life was something too precious to give up on so easily. ↗

— Belinda Jeffrey

#give-up #laughter #life #precious #spontaneity

I have been told by the third grade teacher that my daughter Poppet is reading at middle school level. Yet if I leave Poppet a note in block letters telling her to feed the dogs I will come home to find the dogs have been ... given a swim in the above-ground pool, dressed in tutus, provided with hair weaves. What I will not find is that the dogs have been fed. 'I thought you wanted me to free the dogs,' says Poppet whose school district is not spending quite what D.C.'s is, thanks to voter rejection of the last school bond referendum. ↗

— P.J. O'Rourke

#dogs #feeding #freedom #humour #middle-school

Tu seras toujours mon ami. Tu auras envie de rire avec moi. ↗

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

#foreign-language #french #friendship #laughter #friendship

I couldn't make myself imagine Dad holding some creamy-faced baby, cooing at it, telling it he loved it. Taking it to baseball games. Living some life he'd probably consider his 'real life,' the one he deserved rather than the one he got. ↗

— Jennifer Brown

#fathers-and-daughters #parents #imagination

Nothing brings on jealousy like laughter. ↗

— Françoise Sagan

#laughter #jealousy

In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again(15). ↗

— Barbara Kingsolver

#dark #high #joy #kingsolver #life

The time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only the electronic clocks but the wind-up kind too. The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again. There was nothing I could do about it. As an Earthling I had to believe whatever clocks said -and calendars. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#human #life #slaughterhouse-five #time #life