Alicia

“The stories don't fit back together, and it's the end of stories, those devices we carry like shells and shields and blinkers and occasionally maps and compasses. The people close to you become mirrors and journals in which you record your history, the instruments that help you know yourself and remember yourself, and you do the same for them. When they vanish so does the use, the appreciation, the understanding of those small anecdotes, catchphrases, jokes: they become a book slammed shut or burnt... The stories shatter. Or you wear them out or leave them behind. Over time the memory loses power. Over time you become someone else.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“This man had also spent time in a chair, in a dark room, staring at a wall. We tried to remember how it happens, the giving up: how the mind turns on itself and pinions the body to furniture and then convinces you that it is the furniture that has pinioned your mind. The furniture, or the girlfriend, or the husband, with their supernatural ability to cause your feelings. But it is so hard to remember the demonic logic of the place. For our friends we should remember, when they think they're stuck with sadness forever and we're trying to shine some small light on the way out.”
― Kristin Dombek

“Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them.”
― Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her