April

“It was as if they had leapt over the arduous cavalry of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“She was taking two sides at once, to please everyone; she always chose peace over truth, was always eager to conform.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“Poverty could pile on; living it often meant steering through gnarled thickets of interconnected misfortunes and trying not to go crazy. There were moments of calm, but life on balance was facing one crisis after another.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“We came home. I took off all the clothes that I’d worn there and threw them down the trash chute. I gave my cap to my little son. He really wanted it. And he wore it all the time. Two years later they gave him a diagnosis: a tumor in his brain . . . You can write the rest of this yourself. I don’t want to talk anymore.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster