Cass

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“There's a type of inborn initiative that comes from having never been obligated to answer questions about one's name, or one's country of so-called origin, or to explain the way you look is generationally and geographically worlds apart from where you were born. Since childhood, there's been this assumption that I owe strangers an answer when they inquire about matters I myself struggle to have words for, let alone understand.”
― Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

“The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.”
― Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion