Rebekah

“The rain is falling in silver needles into the forest green outside my window. The wind slathers it against the glass and it smears into little lenses of distorting clarity. Some raindrops gather on the window casing, bead up fat and round, then fall. The rain’s forms are all beautiful. The human eye does more than see; it stitches the seen and unseen together, the temporal and the eternal. It wakes me again and again to the astonishment of finding myself in a body moving through a world of beauty and dying and mystery. It is as if the world were a series of questions, and astonishment were the answer.”
― Alison Hawthorne Deming, Writing the Sacred into the Real

“To my mind, joy is a constitutive part of the emotional rhetoric and comportment of those against whom the present swells at an annihilating pace. With joy, we breach the haze of suffering that denies us creativity and literature. Joy is art is an ethics of resistance.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“Failures weigh people down. Writing reports of all the cases I was unable to solve, however, had helped me to tell stories, or at least get them down on paper, as they say. Whether I was obeying or taming language is not important.... Sometimes failures push us to open the door of a run-down old house, to clean the dust off the unused furniture and find a drawer where an old typewriter hides. Failures force us to reflect, and reflection, with any luck, may lead us to a coastal city and a pile of blank pages.”
― Cristina Rivera Garza, The Taiga Syndrome

“The woman. I did carry a few of her images in my head, for example the recurrent image of the forest, the word 'coniferous,' the word 'boreal.' The word 'footpath.' All together, they constituted something like a mantra, or the sentimental beads of a rosary. When nothing else seemed to make sense, sense was hidden in irrefutable words: a sliver or the space for a sliver.”
― Cristina Rivera Garza, The Taiga Syndrome