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1 " Kitchen-sink cookies," Trishiffany proclaimed. "Sounds disgusting, right? But I've always been so torn about chocolate chips versus butterscotch chips, but here you don't even have to choose. Walnuts and peanuts! Oatmeal and cornflakes! Raisins and dried cherries. Not to mention the shredded coconut. Sometimes we just need our little freedoms, you know? "
― Helen Phillips , The Beautiful Bureaucrat
2 " ...and one of those neat spiral stairways in the far corner-I wonder where it leads. Spiral staircases always seem to me like they must lead somewhere special. "
― Helen Phillips , Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green
3 " It was wise to put bureaucrats in windowless offices. "
4 " Tennyson said that if we could but understand a single flower we might know who we are and what the world is. Perhaps he was trying to say that there is nothing, however humble, that does not imply the history of the world and its infinite concatenation of causes and effects. —JORGE LUIS BORGES, “The Zahir "
― Helen Phillips , The Need
5 " I just want to feel immaculate for a few minutes a day, "
6 " She and David had a running joke about how they both feared their kids at night the same way that, as children, they’d feared monsters under the bed. Beasts that would rise up from the side of your bed, seize you with sharp nails and demand things of you. "
7 " Trishiffany said. “And your child was the 129,285,656,702nd.” “Do you know how many hours I spent sneaking around here in the middle "
8 " A life lived in fear is a life half-lived, "
9 " The two women and their single shadow left the palace on a street paved with gold. They walked until the gold turned to dirt, and they kept walking. The road was long and straight. No sound but the sound of pebbles shifting beneath their feet. Sometimes one would carry the baby. Sometimes the other would carry the baby. They did not have water or anything else. They walked. They were two women with one live child and one ghost child. They were two women with four children. They were three women with six children, nine women with eighteen children, fifty women with a hundred children, five hundred women with a thousand children, their single shadow before them. "
10 " It puzzled her that orgasm wasn’t widely considered a phenomenon that challenges everything we believe about human existence—doesn’t it serve as proof of an alternate state of being? Isn’t the fact that people can feel this way, so in thrall to this enigmatic force, so carried by it, even for an instant, evidence that the state in which we spend most of our time is merely one possibility? "
11 " It was with some pride that she screwed the tops onto the bottles of milk. Nearly four ounces in each. She pressed the pair of bottles, warm with her milk, against her cheeks. Partway the accomplishment of an animal, partway the accomplishment of a deity. "
12 " Moment by moment, maddened by them and melted by them, maddened/melted, maddened/melted, maddened/melted. "
13 " Molly wanted to sway to sleep in the hammock of her children’s breathing. "
14 " Moment by moment, maddened by them and melted by them, maddened / melted, maddened / melted, maddened / melted. "
15 " She wondered if other mothers experienced it, this permanent state of mild panic, and worried that perhaps they didn't, that perhaps there was something wrong with her. "
16 " Brilliant, Molly thought, the cheese samples would absorb the kids while she finished the last bit of shopping for the party - the juice boxes, the rainbow sprinkles, the streamers, the other expenses and excesses of the exhausted mother. What a thing it was, grocery shopping, so tedious and so crucial. "
