37 Quotes by Jessica Francis Kane

It seems to me that your oldest friends can offer a glimpse of who you were from a time before you had a sense of yourself.

Forgiveness without understanding is like faith without proof.

Mara had gotten people talking again about the Dunbar number – the maximum number of people with whom any individual can maintain stable relationships – and how, despite predictions, it hadn’t gotten any bigger in the age of social media. Pg171

Consider the word visit. It’s from the Old French visiter, which meant “to inspect, examine, or afflict.” You can visit a neighbour or a friend, but so can plagues and pestilence. And Travel. It’s from the Middle English travailen, which meant originally “to toil or labor; torture.”So clearly traveling to visit friends should not be done lightly. Pg 3

When little, friends play house in order to pretend to be family, which is ironic because the beautify of friends is that they are chosen, not given. Should siblings, play friends? And so we 'make' friends or 'find' them? Emily Dickinson thought that the best verb was 'enact'.

So, how's your family?I could say we've grown more comfortable with peace than joy, patience over hope, and perseverance feels the same as love.I could say happy families are supposed to be all alike, but eve the happiest, after forty years, probably has some reckoning to do.

Are we a family damaged beyond repair? I don't know. I do believe in the power of words and stories to make sense of things.

Midway through my fortieth year, I reached a point where the balance of the past and all it contained seemed to outweigh the future, my mind so full of things said and not said, done and undone, I no longer understood how to move forward. I was tipped backward and wobbly, my balance was off, and this made sense to me. A life seemed so long, I couldn't see how anyone proceeded under the accumulated weight of it.

I'm aware not everyone feels the way I do about trees, but I have no idea why not.