Raina

“There was a time when I believed there was loss that could not be defined, that language had not caught up to death's enormity.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn

“Some people don't believe that you can meet a person and know that's the person for you for the rest of your life. I'm not going to try to argue with them on that. I know what I know.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“Oh! And remember a few years ago when a dude in the US legit had Ebola and went bowling and ate chicken wings with friends instead of quarantining himself because #WhiteNonsense? Say it with me: Dumpster. Fire.”
― Phoebe Robinson, Everything's Trash, But It's Okay

“In Poetry as Survival, Gregory Orr asks the survivor’s questions about violence: How could I have been that close and not been destroyed by it? Why was I spared?—questions that can initiate in a writer the quest for meaning and purpose. “But this quest born out of trauma doesn’t simply lead the survivor forward,” he writes. “First it leads him or her backward, back to the scene of the trauma where the struggle must take place with the demon or angel who incarnates the mystery of violence and the mystery of rebirth and transformation.” He is referring to Lorca’s idea of duende: a demon that drives an artist, causing trouble or pain and an acute awareness of death. Of the demon’s effect on an artist’s work, Lorca wrote: “In trying to heal the wound that never heals lies the strangeness.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir