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“This is my soul and the world unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air. Finally whispering the same two words over and over: 'Keep walking. Keep walking. Keep walking.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“I’ve just never met someone like you," as if I were a stranger from another town or an eccentric guest accompanying a mutual friend to a dinner party. It was a strange thought to hear from the mouth of the woman who had birthed and raised me, with whom I shared a home for eighteen years, someone who was half me. My mother had struggled to understand me just as I struggled to understand her. Thrown as we were on opposite sides of a fault line—generational, cultural, linguistic—we wandered lost without a reference point, each of us unintelligible to the other’s expectations, until these past few years when we had just begun to unlock the mystery, carve the psychic space to accommodate each other, appreciate the differences between us, linger in our refracted commonalities. Then, what would have been the most fruitful years of understanding were cut violently short, and I was left alone to decipher the secrets of inheritance without its key.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Home is the place that's always open.”
― Maya Shanbhag Lang, What We Carry: A Memoir

“Onward. Always onward.

I blow her a kiss
across the linoleum, &
whisper blessings under my breath,

divide a piece of God
from my heart
for her to carry.

I know she does the same for me.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Clap When You Land