Jordan

“A number of children kept coming over to the tennis courts, rattling on the gate, and trying to get in. The watching middle-class mums did nothing to restrain them. Eventually my friend yelled, “Go AWAY!” Whereupon the watching mums did do something. A mob of them descended on us as though my friend had exposed himself. Suddenly we were in the midst of a maternal zombie film. It was the nearest I’ve ever come to getting lynched—they were after my friend rather than me and though, strictly speaking, I was his opponent, I was a tacit accomplice—and a clear demonstration that the rights of parents and their children to do whatever they please have priority over everyone else’s. “A child is the very devil,” wrote Virginia Woolf in a letter, “calling out, as I believe, all the worst and least explicable passions of the parents.”
― Geoff Dyer, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“Yoga was still terrible, like a game of Simon Says with no winner.”
― Bassey Ikpi, I'm Telling the Truth, but I'm Lying: Essays

“Meet me deep in the heart or nowhere at all.”
― Erica Alex, Cake in the Blackbird Stew

“Even when the best things occur, when the sun is angled just enough to offer light or there is beauty somewhere shining in the distance, the voice says‚ This will not last. You do not deserve this peace. Remember that time . . . remember how he cried . . . remember how she shook with disappointment. Remember how you break everything you touch”
― Bassey Ikpi, I'm Telling the Truth, but I'm Lying: Essays