Rachel

“What did parents in the seventies do when kids were bored in the back? Nothing! They let them suck in gas fumes. Torture their siblings. And since it wasn’t actually used for wearing, play with the seatbelt. If at any point you complained about being bored at home, you were really asking for it. “Go outside,” your parents would roar, or worse, “Clean your room.”
― Pamela Paul, 100 Things We've Lost to the Internet

“But for a very long time, even after my life had moved on and even soared, even after I had a home of my own, a family of my own, in so many ways the vibrant life I’d dreamed of as a child, even then I couldn’t speak of my mother without tears. I couldn’t even say a simple thing like “my mother grew up in Brooklyn” without crying. For this reason, I learned not to speak of her at all. The tears felt unacceptable; it made no sense to grieve a mother who was still alive, even a mother as difficult as mine. But I couldn’t accept the chasm between the mother I remembered, who’d been my greatest companion, champion, and love, and the one I had now. Yet that childhood mother—if she’d ever existed in the first place—had walked away with the diaries I handed her on the final day of freshman year, and it was, for all intents and purposes, the last I ever saw of her.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“Back in the days of Sugar Pops and roller skates, grown-ups had no clue where their kids were, who they were with, or what the hell they were up to, and that suited kids just fine.”
― Pamela Paul, 100 Things We've Lost to the Internet

“To learn to swim in the ocean of not-knowing—this is my constant work.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted