Lacey Hoffman

“People start to forget about you after you die and they can’t see you all the time anymore. It was already happening with Andy. I started to notice that at his funeral that was on the day after the wake. Everyone was talking about Andy, but they talked about him like they only remembered some parts of him, not all the parts. “Oh, Andy was just such a darling, such a pleasure to have in class.” “He was hilarious, wasn’t he? What a character!” “He was so bright, incredibly smart.” It was like they weren’t really talking about Andy or they were starting to forget about what he was like.”
― Rhiannon Navin, Only Child

“People often ask me if the book was emotional or difficult to write. Emotional, yes. I typed through a lot of tears. But it was the opposite of difficult. Some of that transcendent grace from the days after the tragedy returned. Maybe that was because I was creating characters somewhat based on friends I loved and so I was deeply ensconced in their world again. It was as if they were right there in the room with me as I wrote. And in a way they were. In a way they have never left me. And that’s just it, isn’t it? That’s how we manage to survive loss. Because love, it never dies, it never goes away, it never fades, so long as you hang on to it. Love can make you immortal.”
― Gayle Forman, If I Stay

“Here are a few statistics: Someone in the world dies by suicide every forty seconds. For every death by suicide there are more than twenty others attempting it. It’s the tenth-ranking cause of death in the United States. One of every sixty-two Americans is a suicide loss survivor. Those were taken from the World Health Organization and the American Association of Suicidology’s official data—the most recent available at the end of 2018 (the time of my writing this updated note).”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“But I can’t quit the one thing that gives meaning to my life. Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic. Writing is creating something out of nothing, is opening doors to other lands. Writing gives you power to shape your own world when the real one hurts too much. To stop writing would kill me. I’d never be able to walk through a bookstore without fingering the spines with longing, wondering at the lengthy editorial process that got these titles on shelves and reminiscing about my own. And I’d spend the rest of life curdling with jealousy every time someone like Emmy Cho gets a book deal, every time I learn that some young up-and-comer is living the life I should be living. Writing has formed the core of my identity since I was a child. After Dad died, after Mom withdrew into herself, and after Rory decided to forge a life without me, writing gave me a reason to stay alive. And as miserable as it makes me, I’ll cling to that magic for as long as I live.”
― R.F. Kuang, Yellowface