Hannah MacDonald

“I was relieved that he left, of course, but at the same time I thought what a thing of sin poverty was, that there could be nothing more sinful than forcing a small child to lie. The wages of that sin were poverty, a wage that one could not endure, leading one to sin again, and as long as one could not pull oneself out of poverty, the cycle would repeat until death.”
― Miri Yū, Tokyo Ueno Station

“To speak is to stumble, to hesitate, to detour and hit dead ends. To listen is straightforward. You can always just listen.”
― Miri Yū , Tokyo Ueno Station

“There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room