Catherine

“Here was yet another person telling him what he needed, how he should act, the person he should be. Another person who didn't think he was enough just as he was.”
― Douglas Stuart, Young Mungo

“Don‘t you think a woman can be poor and happy?'
'Certainly, given the necessary qualifications.'
'Which are—what? Love and trust?'
'No, you idiotic child. A sense of humor, a tough hide and the valuable quality of being sufficient unto oneself.”
― Mary Westmacott, Giant's Bread

“We are, I believe, in the midst of a revolution in our understanding of emotion, the mind, and the brain—a revolution that may compel us to radically rethink such central tenets of our society as our treatments for mental and physical illness, our understanding of personal relationships, our approaches to raising children, and ultimately our view of ourselves. Other scientific disciplines have seen revolutions of this kind, each one a momentous shift away from centuries of common sense. Physics moved from Isaac Newton’s intuitive ideas about time and space to Albert Einstein’s more relative ideas, and eventually to quantum mechanics. In biology, scientists carved up the natural world into fixed species, each having an ideal form, until Charles Darwin introduced the concept of natural selection.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“It wasn’t quite so easy when it came to writing down. Her mind had always gone on about six paragraphs farther than the one she was writing down—and then by the time she got to that, the exact wording had gone out of her head.”
― Mary Westmacott, Unfinished Portrait