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“It’s a whole other kind of sorcery—pulling the pieces of a shattered heart back together, and it’s one I know nothing about.”
― Daniel José Older, Half-Resurrection Blues

“I've spent my life wondering when I would earn the right to be a man again. Despite the undeserved good fortune of finding my true love, I always held a kernel of bitterness in my heart that things were not different... I will never be the man that I was. That man is dead—slain—for better or for worse, by my life as the Beast. In your words, the world does not need who I was.”
― Jack Heckel, A Fairy-tale Ending

“Before, she would have said, "I know," that peculiar American expression that professed agreement rather than knowledge”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“There's a jangle to the music of the dead. I mean that certain something that's so happy and so sad at the same time. The notes almost make a perfect harmony, but don't. Then they do but quickly crash into dissonance. They simmer in that sweet in-between rhythm section rattling along all the while. Chords collapse chaotically into one another and just when you think it's gonna spill into total nonsense, it stands back up and comes through sweet as a lullaby on your mami's lips. Songs that'll make people tap their feet and drink melancholically but not realize the twisting genius lurking within until generations later.”
― Daniel José Older, Salsa Nocturna: Stories