Joana

“When you look in the mirror you see not just your face but a museum. Although your face, in one sense, is your own, it is composed of a collage of features you have inherited from your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on. The lips and eyes that either bother or please you are not yours alone but are also features of your ancestors, long dead pergaps as individuals but still very much alive as fragments in you. Even complex qualities such as your sense of balance, musical abilities, shyness in crowds, or susceptbility to sickness have been lived before. We carry the past around with us all the time, and not just in our bodies. It lives also in our customs, including the way we speak. The past is a set of invisible lenses we wear constantly, and through these we perceive de world and the world perceives us. We stand always on the shoulders of our ancestors, wheter or not we look down to acknowledge them.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“Johnny was dead. But he wasn't. That still body back in the hospital wasn't Johnny. Johnny was somewhere else—maybe asleep in the lot, or playing the pinball machine in the bowling alley, or sitting on the back steps of the church in Windrixville. I'd go home and walk by the lot, and Johnny would be sitting on the curb smoking a cigarette, and maybe we'd lie on our backs and watch the stars. He isn't dead, I said to myself. He isn't dead. And this time my dreaming worked. I convinced myself that he wasn't dead.”
― S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders

“Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge.”
― Andrea Dworkin

“I notice everything I do not have
and decide it is beautiful”
― Rupi Kaur, The Sun and Her Flowers