Shawna Blacksher

“I looked up in the sky and trusted in God.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“What demon could have induced people to line a whole room with orange fabric?”
― Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death

“Summer in Honolulu brings the sweet smell of mangoes, guava, and passionfruit, ripe for picking; it arbors the streets with the fiery red umbrellas of poincianta trees and decorates the sidewalks with the pink and white puffs of blossoming monkeypods. Cooling trade winds prevail all summer, bringing what the old Hawaiians called makani 'olu' 'olu--- "fair wind".”
― Alan Brennert, Honolulu

“My ambition was to negate. The world, whether dense or hollow, provoked only my negations. When I was supposed to be awake, I was asleep; when I was supposed to speak, I was silent; when a pleasure offered itself to me, I avoided it. My hunger, my thirst, my loneliness and boredom and fear were all weapons aimed at my enemy, the world. They didn’t matter a whit to the world, of course, and they tormented me, but I got a gruesome satisfaction from my sufferings. They proved my existence. All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.

So the opportunity to be incarcerated was just too good to resist. It was a very big No—the biggest No this side of suicide.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted