Sarah

“Adults constantly raise the bar on smart children, precisely because they're able to handle it. The children get overwhelmed by the tasks in front of them and gradually lose the sort of openness and sense of accomplishment they innately have. When they're treated like that, children start to crawl inside a shell and keep everything inside. It takes a lot of time and effort to get them to open up again. Kids' hearts are malleable, but once they gel it's hard to get them back the way they were.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Practicing loving-kindness toward ourselves seems as good a way as any to start illuminating the darkness of difficult times.”
― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

“I wished I had always lived in this body, and you could have lived here with me, and I could have told you it’s all right, it’s going to be all right.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“She told us that evil rarely looked like evil when it first arrived. It could look like innovation and progress and prosperity, courage even, but more than anything it looked, to some, like a solution—a solution to the secret problem they believed had gone too long unaddressed. They felt as though they had been speaking a hidden language among themselves, and then a man or a woman in a suit stood on a stage and addressed cheering masses in that very same language, hidden no longer.”
― Laura van den Berg, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories