Chidera

“And you can make yourself look any way you want to, but if you think it’s gonna get the hurt inside you to disappear, you sure wrong. So if you’re asking me if I think you’d be prettier if you was skinny as a reed, you’re askin’ the wrong person. I don’t much care if you’re skinny or pretty, and don’t you start thinking they’re the same thing, but I sure as hell am always gonna think you prettiest when you’re breathing, when you’re fed and housed and happy.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“Why do I immediately start to panic? Once again I feel suspended, unable to step between the tree stumps of my childhood, frozen before the precipice.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts

“Who shall blame him, if, so standing for a moment, he dwells upon fame, upon search parties, upon cairns raised by grateful followers over his bones...but requires sympathy, and whisky, and some one to tell the story of his suffering to at once? Who shall blame him? Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who, very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her—who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?”
― Virginia Woolfe, To the Lighthouse

“You remember how much safer it is to not want nothing at all.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big