Disha

“My memories of him, though few, are mostly pleasant, but memories of people you hardly know are often permitted a kind of pleasantness in their absence. It's those who stay who are judged the harshest, simply by virtue of being around to be judged.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“i only know how to exist when i'm wanted.”
― Mary Lambert

“At the end of his life, the great picture book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak said on the NPR show Fresh Air, “I cry a lot because I miss people. I cry a lot because they die, and I can’t stop them. They leave me, and I love them more.”
He said, “I’m finding out as I’m aging that I’m in love with the world.”
It has taken me all my life up to now to fall in love with the world, but I’ve started to feel it the last couple of years. To fall in love with the world isn’t to ignore or overlook suffering, both human and otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of the stars. It is to hold your children while they cry, to watch as the sycamore trees leaf out in June. When my breastbone starts to hurt, and my throat tightens, and tears well in my eyes, I want to look away from feeling. I want to deflect with irony, or anything else that will keep me from feeling directly. We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.
Sendak ended that interview with the last words he ever said in public: “Live your life. Live your life. Live your life.”
Here is my attempt to do so.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“What was joy, anyway. What was the worth of happiness that left behind a crater thrice the size of its impact. What did people who spoke of joy know of what it meant, to sleep and dream only of the whistle of planes and knocks at the door and on windows and to wake with a hand at one's throat— one's own hand, at one's own throat. What did they know of not speaking for days, of not having known the touch of another, never having known, of want and of not having felt the press of skin to one's own, and what did they know of a house that only ever emptied out. Of animals dying and fathers dying and mothers dying and finding bullet holes in the barks of trees right below hearts carved around names of people who weren't there and the bloody lip of a sibling and what did what did she know— of what could she possibly know of what it—”
― Yael van der Wouden, The Safekeep