Maya

“I think the same is true of dying. We can’t know why you are dying in the same way that we can’t know why you are living. Living and dying are both complete mysteries, and you can’t know either until you have done both.”
― Marianne Cronin, The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot

“An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.”
― Victor Frankl, Man's Search For Ultimate Meaning

“Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting.”
― John Green

“For years afterward, I had dreams in which my mother appeared in strange forms, her features sewn onto other beings in combinations that seemed both grotesque and profound: as a slippery white fish at the end of my hook, with a trout’s gaping, sorrowful mouth and her dark, shuttered eyes; as the elm tree at the edge of our property, its ragged clumps of tarnished gold leaves replaced by knotted skeins of her black hair; as the lame gray dog that lived on the Mueller’s property, whose mouth, her mouth, opened and closed in yearning and who never made a sound. As I grew older, I came to realize that death had been easy for my mother; to fear death, you must first have something to tether you to life. But she had not. It was as if she had been preparing for her death the entire time I knew her. One day she was alive; the next, not.

And as Sybil said, she was lucky. For what more could we presume to ask from death — but kindness?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees