Julia

“Abdul’s father had developed an irritating habit of talking about the future as if it were a bus: “It’s moving past and you think you’re going to miss it but then you say, wait, maybe I won’t miss it—I just have to run faster than I’ve ever run before. Only now we’re all tired and damaged, so how fast can we really run? You have to try to catch it, even when you know you’re not going to catch it, when maybe it’s better just to let it go —”
― Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

“I want you to be very successful. Remember, people like us cannot afford to fail "People like us"… immigrants, exiles, refugees, newcomers, outsiders… Too many words for a shared, recognizable sentiment that, no matter how often described, remains largely undefined. Children of uprooted parents are born into the memory tribe. Both their present and their future are forever shaped by their ancestral past, regardless of whether they have any knowledge of it. If they flourish and prosper, their achievements will be attributed to a whole community; and, in the same way, their failures will be charged up to something bigger and older than themselves, be it family, religion, or ethnicity. While the journey of life may be full of reversals of fortune, children from displaced families can never allow themselves to fall below the level at which their parents started it out.”
― Elif Shafak, There Are Rivers in the Sky

“Books, it seems to me, do not end, even when we are finished reading them.”
― Elif Shafak, There Are Rivers in the Sky

“Sometimes I think that children should be teenagers first, and become small afterwards, because it’s unbearable for parents to get used to the fact that they don’t jump anymore.”
― Fredrik Backman, The Answer Is No