Katie

“And she knew, above all, how to work, which is always the beginning of fashioning a self.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“It took me many years to realize that it’s hard to live in this world. I don’t mean the mechanics of living, because for most of us, our hearts will beat, our lungs will take in oxygen, without us doing anything at all to tell them to. For most of us, mechanically, physically, it’s harder to die than it is to live. But still we try to die. We drive too fast down winding roads, we have sex with strangers without wearing protection, we drink, we use drugs. We try to squeeze a little more life out of our lives. It’s natural to want to do that. But to be alive in the world, every day, as we are given more and more and more, as the nature of “what we can handle” changes and our methods for how we handle it change, too, that’s something of a miracle.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“The house's disappearance from the landscape was not different from my father's absence. His was a sudden erasure for my mother and siblings, a prolonged and present absence for me, an intriguing story with an ever-expanding middle that never drew to a close. The house held my father inside of it, preserved; it bore his traces. As long as the house stood, containing these remnants, my father was not yet gone. And then suddenly, he was.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“we are beating you because you did a wrong thing as a grown man, because you hurt our mother who we love more than anything, because we can beat sense into you and addiction out of you even though of course we cannot, because if we do not beat you someone else will beat you to death and this will destroy us, too.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House