Smritee Singh

“I don't know where this pressure came from. I can't blame my parents because it has always felt internal. Like any other parent, my mother celebrated the A grades and the less-than-A grades she felt there was no need to tell anybody about. But not acknowledging the effort that ended in a less than perfect result impacted me as a child. If I didn't win, then we wouldn't tell anyone that I had even competed to save us the embarrassment of acknowledging that someone else was better. Keeping the secret made me think that losing was something to be ashamed of, and that unless I was sure I was going to be the champion there was no point in trying. And there was certainly no point to just having fun.”
― Portia de Rossi, Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain

“Childhood, after all, is the first precious coin that poverty steals from a child.”
― Anthony Horowitz, The House of Silk

“A friend once told me the hurt that came with the end of a relationship was painful because it was the death of a dream—the future you’d imagined with a lover, a loved one, a child, or a friend. That loss was its own painful, nearly tangible thing. You had to reimagine your future, perhaps in a different place, with different people, doing different things than you might have first imagined.”
― Chloe Neill, Twice Bitten

“Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.”
― Rumi