Whitney Johnson

“we are more than just our genes. We are, in some way, a product of the people who surround us—the people we’re forced to grow up with, and the people we choose to be with later.”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“For so long it was all I wanted. The truth! The truth! Good, fine, but for what? With the truth we will do what, become what? And in gaining the truth, what do we lose? It seems to me now that some truths will never be enough to seal the mysteries that precede them. I think in her own way my mother understood this all along—that there is nothing the truth can give you that you cannot give yourself. That in the end, you just have to decide. To live. To continue.”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“But now he came up to himself slowly again—it was like rising through heavy water—and he was warmed by one of the great consolations: nothing very terrible lasts for very long.”
― Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier

“I don’t know if I ever liked you,” I say, and bathroom acoustics being what they are, the declaration is magnified and that much more unkind, which makes me feel bad until I see that he is missing a shoe, and I feel it anew, this terrible disappointment in myself that I am happy to take out on him. He is the most obvious thing that has ever happened to me, and all around the city it is happening to other silly, half-formed women excited by men who’ve simply met the prerequisite of living a little more life, a terribly unspecial thing that is just what happens when you keep on getting up and brushing your teeth and going to work and ignoring the whisper that comes to you at night and tells you it would be easier to be dead. So, sure, an older man is a wonder because he has paid thirty-eight years of Con Ed bills and suffered food poisoning and seen the climate reports and still not killed himself, but somehow, after being a woman for twenty-three years, after the ovarian torsion and student loans and newfangled Nazis in button-downs, I too am still alive, and actually this is the more remarkable feat. Instead I let myself be awed by his middling command of the wine list.”
― Raven Leilani