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“My greatest hope is that having known you were so loved as a child that you will be able to choose for your friends and companions people who love you for your own true self. That you will know how to give yourself a happier, kinder, more supportive and loving life than I knew how to give myself. Because I grew up with parents who did not know how to express their love for me, never having been given love themselves when they were children, I didn’t know how to give myself a loving, nurturing life as a grown-up. I pray that though I didn’t get to stay with you nearly long enough that somehow I have been able to help you feel so loved and valued in the time we had together that you will know that you are worthy to be loved and nurtured as an adult and that you, in turn, will be able to freely express your love and caring for others.”
― Genevieve Kingston, Did I Ever Tell You?

“To be a boy opened doors that would never open for me, shielded him in a way where my own status as a woman had stripped me naked.”
― June Hur, The Red Palace

“In truth, at first it is a protective stance, a shrinking from further pain, because I am drained limp from crying, and to speak about it would be to cry again. But later it is because I want to sit alone with my grief. I want to protect—hide? hide from?—these foreign sensations, this bewildering series of hills and valleys.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“To believe that life is far greater than this one wretched moment.”
― June Hur, A Crane Among Wolves