Liu Yan

“Learn as if you were not reaching your goal and as though you were scared of missing it”
― Confucius

“low-income parents find themselves having to do this immensely difficult thing: they have to tell hteir kids to listen to them and yet also send them the message “don’t be like me.” It is difficult to exercise authority under these conditions. To have one’s parenting practices be unintelligible, unacknowledged, deemed less worthy, is a profound form of attack on the self, especially when being a parent is a central part of one’s identity.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.”
― Confucius

“I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can't believe it now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can't imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven't been.”
― Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories