Sunny Yu

“All my life, I’d been silent. Whenever I’d been tempted to speak, I’d quickly changed my mind. “Why bother?” I’d say to myself. “What difference will it make if you speak?” In the past, I’d been just as quick to let emotion get in the way — to decide, on slim evidence, that a certain person could never understand me. But this time, my first impressions stood fast: she would understand me perfectly.”
― Sabahattin Ali, Madonna in a Fur Coat

“For as long as I lived, I would travel far and wide, meeting with people whose languages I did or did not know, and everywhere I went, I would be looking for Maria Puder. In every pair of eyes, I would be searching for the Madonna in a Fur Coat. I knew from the outset that I would never find her. Yet it was not in my power to give up searching. She had condemned me to a lifelong quest for a cypher, for someone who did not exist. She should never have done this to me.”
― Sabahattin Ali, Madonna in a Fur Coat

“Sometimes the people you loved left you halfway through a story. Sometimes they left you without a goodbye. And, sometimes, they stayed around in little ways. In the memory of a musical. In the smell of their perfume. In the sound of the rain, and the itch for adventure, and the yearning for that liminal space between one airport terminal and the next. I hated her for leaving, and I loved her for staying as long as she could. And I would never wish this pain on anyone.”
― Ashley Poston, The Seven Year Slip

“I didn't need to be fixed. I just needed...to be reminded that I was human.”
― Ashley Poston, The Seven Year Slip