Jessica

“What is wrong with being too much? With being too big? With being openly sexual, openly emotional -- with having "no calmness or content except when the needs of [your] individual nature were satisfied," as Martineau wrote of Wollstonecraft -- or even with being openly unhappy?

Only this: Insisting on the needs of your individual nature, being unquiet and unhappy when those needs are not satisfied, requires that you have an individual nature to begin with. And it requires that you not be ashamed of it.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“You always tell me it's too late for you to read, with your poor liver, your exhausted bones, that after everything you've been through, you'd just like to rest now. That reading is a privilege you made possible for me with what you lost. I know you believe in reincarnation. I don't know if I do but I hope it's real. Because then maybe you'll come back here next time around. Maybe you'll be a girl and maybe your name will be Rose again, and you'll have a room full of books with parents who will read you bedtime stories in a country not touched by war.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“when'd the west set in your bones? you survive
each winter like you were made for snow, a stranger

to each ancestor who lights your path. your parents,
dead, never taught you their language -- stranger

to everything that tries to bring you home.”
― Fatimah Asghar, If They Come for Us

“You really wouldn't think, to look at the playground, that hundreds of people over on the other side of the world had just had their lives crushed by a horrible earthquake. And the weird thing was, everybody probably knew about it. Everybody had glanced at the newspaper headlines or heard the radio in passing or glimpsed something as they changed channels on the TV. Hundreds of Casualties in Massive Philippine Earthquake. But 'hundreds' are not people, are they? And blank faces on TV are not people either.”
― Candy Gourlay, Tall Story