Michelle

“From the Latin for “terrible,” “cruel.” Atrox, atrocis. When did the word come to take on such scale? Endless pits gouged in the earth. The Americans in the hamlet of My Lai, some of them shooting themselves in the feet to get out of it. The South Vietnamese with their tiger cages, their filing a man’s teeth down to the gums.”
― Quan Barry, She Weeps Each Time You're Born

“That although we might want to tell other people’s stories, we always end up telling our own.”
― Alejandro Zambra, Ways of Going Home

“There is a mythical element to our childhood, it seems, that stays with us always. When we are young, we consume the world in great gulps, and it consumes us, and everything is mysterious and alive and fills us with desire and wonder, fear, and guilt. With the passing of the years, however, those memories become distant and malleable, and we shape them into the stories of who we are. We are brave, or we are cowardly. We are loving, or we are cruel.”
― Eowyn Ivey, To the Bright Edge of the World

“You don’t know your origin tales, your biological truth (accident), your deaths (mosquito bites, mostly), your lives (denial, cheerfully).”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers