a dash of this or that

You could not have all that you wanted, but if you found love, you were fortunate.

The constant project of our girl selves seeming to require odd and precise attentions.

Living alone was frightening in that way. No one to police the spill of yourself, the ways you betrayed your primitive desires. Like a cocoon built around you, made of your own naked proclivities and never tidied into the patterns of actual human life.

In a little while it would be different, there would come tomorrow, and the next day, and another year. And we would be changed perhaps, never sitting quite like this again. Some of us would go away, or suffer, or die; the future stretched away in front of us, unknown, unseen, not perhaps what we wanted, not what we planned. This moment was safe though, this could not be touched.

"We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still too close to us. The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again, and that sense of fear, of furtive unrest, struggling at length to blind unreasoning panic—now mercifully stilled, thank God—might in some manner unforeseen become a living companion, as it had been before."

Tiny little good moments that you catch like a firefly, and just like fireflies, you have to release them, because the whole point is that they’re tiny and little and need to be with other fireflies. They aren’t a pet. They aren’t yours to keep. They’re just moments. They’re just fireflies.