Zoë

“Just when you think you have summed everything up,
painted it clearly and given meaning to what was once just
a pool of colored paint, another canvas crops up blank and
ready to be filled.”
― Emily Franklin

“She taught us to ask. Never be afeared to look dumb. ’Cause looking dumb don’t matter. Being
dumb, that matter. So just ask. And if you don’t get a straight answer, then go seeking. No matter what
it is. Just go seeking.”
― Donna Jo Napoli, Alligator Bayou

“Perhaps I should go back a few years earlier. My parents, who travelled from Odessa, the Russian city on the Black Sea, shortly before the 1914 war, were part of a vast migration of Jews fleeing Tsarist oppression to the dream of America that obsessed poor men all over Europe. The tailors thought of it as a place where people had, maybe, three, four different suits to wear. Glaziers grew dizzy with excitement reckoning up the number of windows in even one little skyscraper. Cobblers counted twelve million feet, a shoe on each. There was gold in the streets for all trades; a meat dinner every single day. And Freedom. That was not something to be sneezed at, either.

But my parents never got to America.”
― Emanuel Litvinoff, Journey through a Small Planet

“He said/she said is why so many victims (or survivors, if you prefer that terminology) don’t come forward. All too often, what “he said” matters more, so we just swallow the truth. We swallow it, and more often than not, that truth turns rancid. It spreads through the body like an infection. It becomes depression or addiction or obsession or some other physical manifestation of the silence of what she would have said, needed to say, couldn’t say.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body