Michael Sliney

“One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect—you don’t call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go according to any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds; they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

“His mind tired–tired with nothing, tired with everything, with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

“She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.”

—Kate Chopin, “The Awakening”