aurora

“I don't miss my name and I haven't bothered to replace it. I miss your name. I'm sorry but I have forgotten it, too. I don't look for it on the walls. The thought that I might read it and pass it by, just to go on to the next name is terrible. Like meeting you in another life and failing to recognize you.”
― Anne de Marcken, It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

“The alternative to appropriation is a world in which artists only reference their own cultures."

"That's an oversimplification of the issue."

"The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world don't you? I'm terrified of that world and I don't want to live in a that world, and as a mixed race person, I literally don't exist in it. My dad, who I barely knew, was Jewish. My mom was an American-born Korean. I was raised by Korean immigrant grandparents in Korea Town Los Angeles and as any mixed race person will tell you-- to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“I close my eyes and try to breathe but the end of the world is in my throat.”
― Anne de Marcken, It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

“He felt a flash of familiar shame—his whole life had been a steady procession of him passionately loving what other people merely liked, and struggling, mostly failing, to translate to anyone else how and why everything mattered so much.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!