Ms. Kat

“Why don't I ever want to do what I'm supposed to do?”
― Nnedi Okorafor

“Sadie walked under the gates, one by one by one. At first, she felt nothing, but as she kept moving ahead, she began to feel an opening and a new spaciousness in her chest. She realized what a gate was: it was an indication that you had left one space and were entering another.
She walked through another gate.
It occurred to Sadie: She had thought after Ichigo that she would never fail again. She had thought she arrived. But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through. (Until, of course, there wasn't.)
She walked through another gate.
What was a gate, anyway?
A doorway, she thought. A portal. The possibility of a different world. The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before.
By the time she reached the end of the torii gate pathway, she felt resolved. Both Sides had failed, but it didn't have to be the end. The game was one in a long line of spaces between gates.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“The ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”
― David Whyte, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

“I remember asking Rayya . . . if there was anything that somebody could have said or done back in the day, that might’ve convinced her to quit drugs sooner. She replied, “The only thing that might’ve made me clean sooner would’ve been if every person in my life he cut me off sooner. Because as long as I still had anyone left out there who I could bullshit and use, or borrow money from, or crash with, or who would listen to my sob story, there was no reason for me to quit. It wasn’t until I had burned every bridge, and there was nobody left, who would even pick up the phone when I called, that I really had to face myself and decide whether I wanted to live or die. But I had to do that alone, when there was nobody left to manipulate. If I’ve gotten to that place sooner, I might’ve quit sooner.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River