Sarah Ezzat

“There has to be something in you, something that hungers for clarity. And you will need that hunger, because if you follow that path, soon enough you will find yourself confronting not just their myths, not just their stories, but your own. This is difficult, if only because so much of our myth-making was done in service of liberation, in doing whatever we could to dig our way out of the pit into which we were cast. And above us stand the very people who did the casting, jeering, tossing soil into our eyes and yelling down at us, “You’re doing it wrong.” But we are not them, and the standards of enslavers, colonizers, and villains simply will not do. We require another standard—one that sees the sharpening of our writing as the sharpening of our quality of light. And with that light we are charged with examining the stories we have been told, and how they undergird the politics we have accepted, and then telling new stories ourselves.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“But these were days of self-fulfillment, where settling for something that was not quite your first choice of a life seemed weak-willed and ignoble. Somewhere, surrendering to what seemed to be your fate had changed from being dignified to being a sign of your own cowardice. There were times when the pressure to achieve happiness felt almost oppressive, as if happiness were something that everyone should and could attain, and that any sort of compromise in its pursuit was somehow your fault.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“He had, though, hadn’t he, benefited from that shift—addiction recast as a reaper who could enter any home, making crime-tough fogies adjust their timeworn tune. His lawyer had worked to ensure it. Iron your suit, comb your hair, all reminders of a lifelong lesson: that class and its comportment offered a proximity to whiteness that could make you a person in another’s eyes, one deserving of a second chance.”
― Rob Franklin

“My clients were already in the process of dying and often had a certain clarity about things. Knowing that death was impending seemed to allow them to deal in absolutes—as if they had one last piece to fit into the puzzle of their life and they knew exactly where it went. There was a freedom in having no future to speculate about. But for most people, death was an unknown—an inevitable but nebulous event that could be minutes or decades away. And from my experience, the ones who preferred not to think about it while living tended to have the most regrets while dying.”
― Mikki Brammer, The Collected Regrets of Clover