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Quote by Ross Gay

“I have no children of my own, but I love a lot of kids and love a lot of people with kids, who, it seems to me, are in constant communion with terror, and that terror exists immediately beside . . . let’s here call it delight—different from pleasure, connected to joy, Zadie Smith’s joy, somehow—terror and delight sitting next to each other, their feet dangling off the side of a bridge very high up.”

Quote by Ross Gay

Work

The Book of Delights: Essays

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Author

Ross Gay

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“I am not good, and I told you so. Somehow I cannot forgive her for her neglect of me as a child, when I would have clung to her. Besides, I hardly ever heard from her when I was at school. And I know she put a stop to my coming over to her wedding. I saw the letter she wrote to Madame Lefevre. A child should be brought up with its parents, if it is to think them infallible when it grows up.”

“Why don't you have your children go to church? There is only one rational answer to that question. It might be put into some such form as this: "I have no special objection to churches. They are useful. So are free libraries. People who have no books at home find free libraries a great benefit; but my family have at home all the books they need. So people who are not well supplied with religion derive undoubted benefit from churches; but my family have at home all the religion they need. The community would be about as well off without any churches as it is with the churches it has. If no other charity seems more important, I am willing to contribute to a church as I might to a free library; but really I see no reason why I should go to church myself, or expect my children to go." That is a rational answer. I know of no other answer essentially different that could be called rational.”