Kevin Smiley

“Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”
― Anais Nin

“It’s a secondhand world we’re born into. What is novel to us is only so because we’re newborn, and what we cannot see, that has come before- what our parents have seen and been and done- are the hand-me-downs we begin to wear as swaddling clothes, even as we ourselves are naked. The flaw runs through us, implicating us in its imperfection even as it separates us, delivers us onto opposite sides of a chasm. It is both terribly beautiful and terribly sad, but it is, finally, the fault in the universe that gives birth to us all.”
― Katherine Min, Secondhand World