Jess

“Truth over delusion. Growth over comfort.”
― M.L. Wang, Blood Over Bright Haven

“When people think about traveling to the past, they do it with this wild sense of self-importance. Like, ‘gosh, I better not step on that flower or my grandfather will never be born.’ But in the present we mow our lawns and poison ants and skip parties and miss birthdays all the time. We never think about the effects of that stuff.” Roya was working herself up. “Nobody thinks of now as the future past.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“The stories are everywhere, you cannot avoid them. Every day you tell a story to yourself; the details of your day become a part of your myth. It is reordered. It is made sense of.”
― Simon Jimenez, The Spear Cuts Through Water

“Human life is quick. I do not mean: Life is short. I mean: The reason we feel like certain significant days happened only yesterday is because they did. Many of us have bodies that age preposterously out of proportion with how young we are. It’s like aging in theater time. We’re all seven-year-olds hired to play the parts of adults. A decade is not long. Two decades is not long. We say it is because we weigh it against the end of our life span. Our life spans are short and do not give us time to feel temporally in proportion.”
― Marie-Helene Bertino, Beautyland