Yilin

“In the center of the complicated nexus of adores and hated, desired but also easy to watch being destroyed, it had to be a Black woman.”
― Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars

“And I knew the point of love right then.

The point of love was to help you survive.

The point was also to forget meaning. To stop looking and start living. The meaning was to hold the hand of someone you cared about and to live inside the present. Past and future were myths. The past was just the present that had died and the future would never exist anyway, because by the time we got to it the future would have turned into the present. The present was all there was. The ever-moving, ever-changing present. And the present was fickle. It could only be caught by letting go.”
― Matt Haig, The Humans

“Words may fall short, but they cast long shadows that sometimes can reach the unspeakable.”
― Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow

“In every life there is a moment. A crisis. One that says: what I believe is wrong. It happens to everyone, the only difference is how that knowledge changes them. In most cases, it is simply a case of burying that knowledge and pretending it isn’t there. That is how humans grow old. That is ultimately what creases their faces and curves their backs and shrinks their mouths and ambitions. The weight of that denial. The stress of it. This is not unique to humans. The single biggest act of bravery or madness anyone can do is the act of change.

I was something. And now I am something else.”
― Matt Haig, The Humans