Quotes from recent reads......

I just finished the best book called Casting a Fragile Thread about three sisters who grew up a part of white society in colonial Africa. I would recommend this book to anyone who's been to Africa or who has a funny accent and is living in a new country (like me). The follow passage could have been one that I wrote myself. I laughed so hard while I read this:

Mostly I just stayed in the apartment....We did go to parties and dinners in New York, quite often really. Most people I met, confident men and women with educations and opinions, heard my accent and asked me questions like "Do you have fraternities in England?" They always looked a little vague when they heard I was from Zimbabwe, one of the old colonial countries in Africa that used to be called what-was-it-again? Wasn't it brushed with something like white supremacy? Or was it?

"Oh, I know someone who went to Zimbabwe when it was still the Belgian Congo," one woman said confidently, although mostly I heard: "Is Zimbabwe part of South Africa?"

"Where did you go to college?" would invariably be the next question, an attempt to bounce into familiar territory with a one-word reply that could potentially offer up a jackpot of information. Mortified, I would admit, yet again, that I had never gone to college, and for a moment they would look shocked, as though I had made the faux pas of drifting into the wrong social class, and then they looked embarrassed, having no idea of what else there could possibly be left to say.

On one occasion, at a party celebrating a young woman ... who had just landed a new job, the guest of honor asked me, "And what do you do?" Knowing I couldn't make nothing sound as exciting as Wall Street at seventy thousand a year, I blurted, "I'm waiting for a green card." --Wendy Kann, Casting with a Fragile Thread


If I've learned one lesson from all that's happened to me, it's that there is no such thing as the biggest mistake of your existence. There's no such thing as ruining your life. Life's a pretty resilient thing, it turns out. --Sophie Kinsella


I think your heart grows back bigger, you know, once you get the [stuffing] beat out of you. And the universe lets your heart expand that way, and I think that's the function of all this pain and heartache that we go through. You gotta go through that to come out to a better place.
--Must Love Dogs