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“Parents die, and children go on living. It is statistically sound to say that this is the case for the majority of the population.

But sometimes children die before their parents.

Children die, and parents go on living. Those parents go on living because they do not have many options they either live or follow their children down to Hades.

Children die, and parents go on living. Those parents go on living because death, though a hard, hard thing, is not always the hardest thing. Both my children chose a hard thing. We are left with the hardest:to live after their deaths.”
― Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow

“Never feel that you’re obliged to show your pain to the world,” she said. “Very few people deserve to see your tears.”
― Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow

“But books were different. They had lots of blanks. Blanks between words and even between lines. I could squeeze myself in there and sit, or walk, or scribble down my thoughts. It didn’t matter if I had no idea what the words meant. Turning the pages was half the battle.”
― Won-pyung Sohn, Almond

“I don’t want an end point to my sorrow. The death of a child is not a heat wave or a snowstorm, nor an obstacle race to rush through and win, nor an acute or chronic illness to recover from. What is grief but a word, a shortcut, a simplification of something much larger than that word?”
― Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow