#om

I stop to brace myself against the walls, which are painted with the fingerprints of family. from "Lizzie After the War" by www.nancybbrewer.com ↗

— Nancy B. Brewer

#historical-fiction #historical-romance #family

I like your mama,' Trena tells me. 'She seems like good people.' 'Smile!' my mom calls to me from across the room, and I look at her and smile. Because she is good people. And she means well, even if she does drive me crazy. ↗

— Frances O'Roark Dowell

#good #mom #family

Just think! Garden, garden, garden, garden, garden, two happy people, and it could have gone on forever! They knew, they'd been told, but they ate it anyway, and from there on out, 'family!' Shame, fear, jobs, mortality, envy, murder..." "Well," William said brightly, "and sex. ↗

— Deborah Eisenberg

#some-other #family

Every family has secrets, Reena, and they’re there for a reason. ↗

— Renita D'Silva

#indian-fiction #women-s-fiction #family

What am I doing here, Reena? Why am I dancing to the tunes of that old hag?’‘You are saving your family. ↗

— Renita D'Silva

#indian-fiction #women-s-fiction #family

He tries to force the anger down, but it's like an anvil on his chest. He closes his eyes, like Sammy taught him, and forces the anvil up; he softens. ↗

— Chris Crutcher

#communication #emotions #keeping-one-s-cool #relationships #anger

Such an Ibisian scene: both their faces were formal masks, their posture correct, pain kept inside where it cut deeper. ↗

— Andrea K. Höst

#family #masks #pain #family

Aldrich bears witness to the tail-end of the disintegration of that most storied of American dynasties, the Astors. Growing up at Rokeby, the crumbling, 43-room family mansion on the Hudson River, she had ample opportunity to observe and participate in the eccentricities of her once mighty clan. Interweaving recollections from her dysfunctional childhood and tales of glories past, she accurately captures and communicates the madness and malaise that have infected many members of the last few generations of Astors. ↗

— Margaret Flanagan

#memoir #communication

When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, Leo Gursky is survived by an apartment full of shit ↗

— Nicole Krauss

#love #obituary #romance #death

He probably wanted real power, the power to direct one's environment towards a harmonious end, and not fictitious power, the power to order and be obeyed; and he must have known that he had not been able to exercise real power over Rome. It would have been easier for him if what we were told when we were young was true, and that the decay of Rome was due to immorality. Life, however, is never as simple as that, and human beings rarely so potent. There is so little difference between the extent to which any large number of people indulge in sexual intercourse, when they indulge in it without inhibitions and when they indulge in it with inhibitions, that it cannot often be a determining factor in history. The exceptional person may be an ascetic or a debauchee, but the average man finds celibacy and sexual excess equally difficult. All we know of Roman immorality teaches us that absolute power is a poison, and that the Romans, being fundamentally an inartistic people, had a taste for pornography which they often gratified in the description of individuals and families on which that poison had worked. ↗

— Rebecca West

#rome #equality