I'd been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents' tragedy - Alison Bechdel

Miriam: Look, don't fixate on the due date. It's just an approximation. Only 5 percent of babies actually arrive on it. Most come later, in fact.
Clarice: Great! How much later? Two days? Three?
Miriam: Let me give you a friendly tip, Clarice. Don't get too hung up on keeping a tight schedule for the next, say, eighteen years or so.

"I was adrift on the high seas, but my course was becoming clear. It lay between the scylla of my peers and the swirling, sucking charybdis of my family. Veering toward scylla seemed much the safer route, and after navigating the passage, I soon washed up, a bit stunned, on a new shore. Like Odysseus on the island of the cyclops, I found myself facing a "being of colossal strength and ferocity, to whom the law of man and god meant nothing." In true heroic fashion, I moved toward the thing I feared. Yet while Odysseus schemed desperately to escape Polyphemus's cave, I found that I was quite content to stay here forever."

Mo: Thanks for the lentils! I have to go home now and rethink my priorities!