Enya

“For a long time, my hidden shame had made me push everyone away. I'd rejected them before they could reject me. I ran away from close relationships even with the people who loved me. I was a blind man fallen into the ocean.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“To look around the United States today is enough to make prophets and angels weep.
This is not the land of the free;
it is only sporadically the home of the brave.”
― James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro

“It took me many years to realize that it’s hard to live in this world. I don’t mean the mechanics of living, because for most of us, our hearts will beat, our lungs will take in oxygen, without us doing anything at all to tell them to. For most of us, mechanically, physically, it’s harder to die than it is to live. But still we try to die. We drive too fast down winding roads, we have sex with strangers without wearing protection, we drink, we use drugs. We try to squeeze a little more life out of our lives. It’s natural to want to do that. But to be alive in the world, every day, as we are given more and more and more, as the nature of “what we can handle” changes and our methods for how we handle it change, too, that’s something of a miracle.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“In the end, the world didn't owe me anything, not even half a chance. That was the hand I'd been dealt in life, and while detachment was enough for me to withstand hatred, extricating myself from the jaws of suffering called for enough detachment to exercise cruelty.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile