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“There are some words that seem to well up from inside me without reason. I will be walking along an empty hallway, leaning against the wall of an elevator, looking at the ceiling of my apartment when I find myself saying, “sorry.” But I am not saying it to anyone else, it is only for the sound of the word, the feel of it.”
― Eula Biss, The Balloonists

“To write: to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.”
― Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces

“For now, this afternoon, you saw and touched
my heart, dissolved and liquid in your hands.”
― Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Poems, Protest, and a Dream: Selected Writings

“People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time