Sofia Hultmania

“No father knows that he is carrying his son up the stairs for the final time”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Here I Am

“I’ve just never met someone like you," as if I were a stranger from another town or an eccentric guest accompanying a mutual friend to a dinner party. It was a strange thought to hear from the mouth of the woman who had birthed and raised me, with whom I shared a home for eighteen years, someone who was half me. My mother had struggled to understand me just as I struggled to understand her. Thrown as we were on opposite sides of a fault line—generational, cultural, linguistic—we wandered lost without a reference point, each of us unintelligible to the other’s expectations, until these past few years when we had just begun to unlock the mystery, carve the psychic space to accommodate each other, appreciate the differences between us, linger in our refracted commonalities. Then, what would have been the most fruitful years of understanding were cut violently short, and I was left alone to decipher the secrets of inheritance without its key.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Before they had kids, if asked to conjure images of parenthood they would have said things like "Reading in bed," and "Giving a bath," and "Running while holding the seat of a bicycle." Parenthood contains such moments of warmth and intimacy, but isn't them. It's cleaning up. The great bulk of family life involves no exchange of love, and no meaning, only fulfillment. Not the fulfillment of feeling fulfilled, but of fulfilling that which now falls to you.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Here I Am

“I am from the Kilburn branch of the Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation," said Hifan proudly.

Irie inhaled.

Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation," repeated Millat, impressed. "That's a wicked name. It's got a wicked kung-fu arse sound to it."

Irie frowned. "KEVIN?"

We are aware," said Hifan solemnly, pointing to the spot underneath the cupped flame where the initials were minutely embroidered, "that we have an acronym problem.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth