brooke b

“It reminded me, that when we know about suffering, when we are proximal to it, we are capable of extraordinary generosity. We can do and be so much for each other. But only when we see one another in our full humanity. Not as statistics or problems, but as people who deserve to be alive in the world.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“The leaves crisping at their edges. Here is a season Hamnet has not known or touched. Here is a world moving on without him.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet

“It feels so American to discount dreams because they're not built of objects, of things you can hold and catalogue and then put in a safe. Dreams give is voices, visions, ideas, mortal terrors, and departed beloveds. Nothing counts more to an individual, or less to an empire.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.”
― John Williams, Stoner