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Quote by Claire Swinarski

“All these kids today thought you needed so much time. Time, time, time! As if another year would show you the kind of father a person could be, or how the nightmares about battlefields in Vietnam would keep him up at night, or how many times you'd be yelling about refilling the toilet paper roll. No, those things were only learned by commitment. They all thought you had to be in love to commit. They didn't realize it was the other way around: that love came from commitment. Nobody ever tells you when you get married how many days you'll wake up in the morning and want to strangle the other person. No, to them it was all Pinterest boards and buttercream flowers.”

Quote by Claire Swinarski

Work

The Funeral Ladies of Ellerie County

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Author

Claire Swinarski

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“The tears came so fast to Mrs. Pontellier’s eyes that the damp sleeve of her peignoir no longer served to dry them. She was holding the back of her chair with one hand; her loose sleeve had slipped almost to the shoulder of her uplifted arm. Turning, she thrust her face, steaming and wet, into the bend of her arm, and she went on crying there, not caring any longer to dry her face, her eyes, her arms. She could not have told why she was crying.”

“For those whose life together is not one shiny, sunny thing, and often a mixed blessing, Mercury is the natural ruler. We were not easy, you and I. You were trouble and I am difficult. You were faithless and I am fixed. You said you had struck gold when you met me--but you loved bonds that could be broken--gold dissolves in mercury just as salt dissolves in water--but, in reality, nothing is lost. Death, though, is a different reality. You are dissolved. Into what? Into time, into space, into the leaky container that is me, who will also dissolve into time, into space. No. 80 on the Periodic Table, you are gone. But before I take up my role as the long-suffering one--the gold-band-wearing survivor who was always there and is still--I am aware that mercury makes possible the extraction of gold from poorer-quality ores. You brought out the best in me.”

“And Zeus said: “Hera, you can choose some other time for paying your visit to Oceanus — for the present let us devote ourselves to love and to the enjoyment of one another. Never yet have I been so overpowered by passion neither for goddess nor mortal woman as I am at this moment for yourself — not even when I was in love with the wife of Ixion who bore me Pirithoüs, peer of gods in counsel, nor yet with Danaë, the daintly ankled daughter of Acrisius, who bore me the famed hero Perseus. Then there was the daughter of Phonenix, who bore me Minos and Rhadamanthus. There was Semele, and Alcmena in Thebes by whom I begot my lion-hearted son Heracles, while Samele became mother to Bacchus, the comforter of mankind. There was queen Demeter again, and lovely Leto, and yourself — but with none of these was I ever so much enamored as I now am with you.”