avery !!

“Could someone plateau at twenty-four? Could your brain shrink? She felt tired and listless all the time. Often, she was sad for no reason.”
― Silvia Moreno-Garcia, The Bewitching

“I'd worked my whole life to acquire the technical, the emotional skills to make those paintings. I'd chopped tomatoes and peeled half-eaten onion rings off plastic trays for thousands of hours. I'd painted in grief, weeping and painting, painting and weeping. There were probably weeks, whole months when I did not smile even once. I lived in a studio so small I could smell my neighbor's farts. I spent every penny I had on canvas, brushes, paints. I killed myself. I killed my love. I forced myself to forget my husband, my brother. My country. My son.

It's easy for people who have sacrificed nothing to rationalize their own ordinariness by calling me lucky. But I sacrificed my entire life; I sold it to the abyss. And the abyss gave me art.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“But survival is not primarily an act of individual will, of course. It's an act of collective will.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“How can I accept a world where over a million people will die this year for want of a cure that has existed for nearly a century?”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection