Angel Lemke

“Trauma doesn't occur in a vacuum. You don't outgrow it with time. It grows with you, even if the growing goes all wrong. It's like breaking an arm and never putting it in a cast. You're bigger, but the bone is still broken. Maybe there's a throb of pain once in a while. You can't just stop using the arm. The more you use it the more it tears and contorts. You get clumsy. You break more limbs. Even if you see a doctor now, there's no going back to the beginning.”
― Sung Yim, What About the Rest of Your Life

“There is a moment following tragedy that some people never get to experience. You have to be ready for it or it will crush you to dust. It's like a window flung open and naked to the day. It's like being lifted away. It's like being stranded with everything you need. It's the moment you call a cornfield beautiful because you mean it, because you've never seen the world like this before, because newness no longer strikes terror but rather brings hope. You jerk awake into it like meeting yourself on a blind date. You surrender to that sudden first rush of joy without consequence, no more doom or fear or guilt, surrender to the sheer devastating presence of life, huge and indifferent, pushing into you like God's breath.”
― Sung Yim

“In her book The Writing Life (1989), Annie Dillard tells the story of a fellow writer who was asked by a student, "Do you think I could be a writer?" "'Well,' the writer said, 'do you like sentences?'" The student is surprised by the question, but Dillard knows exactly what was meant. He was being told, she explains, that "if he likes sentences he could begin," and she remembers a similar conversation with a painter friend. "I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, 'I like the smell of paint.'" The point, made implicitly (Dillard does not belabour it), is that you don't begin with a grand conception, either of the great American novel or masterpiece that will hang in the Louvre. You begin with a feel for the nitty-gritty material of the medium, paint in one case, sentences in the other.”
― Stanley Fish

“When you have a lot of shine to you, as so many bighearted people often do, you can attract a lot of people easily, because people are drawn to it, that kind of light. It can be so easy to forget that not everyone deserves your shine. But when you spend so much of your earliest years being told you have no shine at all, even though you're pretty sure maybe you do, and someone finally tells you they see it too, you do, you have it, you want to give them everything. Because of this, more often than not, you're not falling in love with them, you're using them as a way to fall in love with yourself.”
― Lane Moore, How to Be Alone: If You Want To, and Even If You Don't