Enya

“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

“Separation was the thing I'd been dreading the most these past few years, and I'd been in denial that it was a fact of life. Refusing to let go, I'd practically thrown a temper tantrum. What's worse, my attempts to avoid separation had only hastened it. It explained why I'd always been so quick to lash out at those I loved.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“…the world doesn’t exist to amplify or exemplify our own preexisting tastes, values, or predilections. It simply exists. We don’t have to like all of it, or remain mute in the face of our discontent. But there’s a difference between going to art with the hope that it will reify a belief or value we already hold, and feeling angry or punitive when it doesn’t, and going to art to see what it’s doing, what’s going on, treating it as a place to get “the real and irregular news of how others around [us] think and feel,” as Eileen Myles once put it.”
― Maggie Nelson, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint

“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