Tea Stankovic

“We can never go back. I know that now. We can go forward. We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago, when we were little and had no voice to speak the heart’s longing. All the years of my life I thought I was searching for love I found, retrospectively, to be years where I was simply trying to recover what had been lost, to return to the first home, to get back the rapture of first love. I was not really ready to love or be loved in the present. I was still mourning—clinging to the broken heart of girlhood, to broken connections. When that mourning ceased I was able to love again.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“True belonging has no hint of arrogance or reactivity, and as Brené Brown says, it is not passive. “[True belonging] is a practice that requires us to be vulnerable, get uncomfortable, and learn how to be present with people without sacrificing who we are.”
― Vienna Pharaon, The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love

“By some estimates, you and I will cross paths with as many as eighty thousand people during our lifetimes. Many of the folks we’ll encounter will be passing acquaintances. Others will be family, friends, and coworkers who remain in our lives for decades. If even one of those people has a lasting impact on us, we’re fortunate.”
― Diane Guerrero, In the Country We Love: My Family Divided

“If snow is the silence that falls from the sky, perhaps rain is an endless sentence.”
― Han Kang, Greek Lessons