April

“My garden is not a metaphor for hope or regeneration, the flowers are never tasked to be the heralds for brightness and optimism. Things in nature merely grow. There is no suicidal or angry rose, there is no depressed or rebellious lily. Plants have but one goal: to live. In order to live they grow when they can, and go into dormancy if needed. They live until they die—and either they die as destined by nature or are cut down by other elements in nature. A garden is a placeholder. Flowers are placeholders.”
― Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow

“People act like you can never forget your own name, but if you’re not paying attention, you can veer so incredibly far away from everything you know about yourself to the point where you stop recognizing what they call you.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Carrie Soto Is Back

“For so long, the past had been a wound still open. Now he could run his finger along the mark those years had left. Scars were nothing but tissue, keratin, a reminder of what the body could endure.”
― Grace D. Li, Portrait of a Thief

“This is how colonialism works. It convinces us that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances that demanded it.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel