Taylor Lear

“Nearly every book has the same architecture--cover, spine, pages--but you open them onto worlds and gifts far beyond what paper and ink are, and on the inside they are every shape and power. Some books are toolkits you take up to fix things, from the most practical to the mostmysterious, from your house to your heart, or to make things, from cakes to ships. Some books are wings. Some are horses that run away with you. Some are parties to which you are invited, full of friends who are there even when you have no friends. In some books you meet one remarkable person; in others a whole group or even a culture. Some books are medicine, bitter but clarifying. Some books are puzzles, mazes, tangles, jungles. Some long books are journeys, and at the end you are not the same person you were at the beginning. Some are handheld lights you can shine on almost anything.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader

“Good Bones"

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.”
― Maggie Smith

“I tried to imagine what I might look like from a star's perspective: a tiny person in a grassy field in southern Utah, all by herself. She just stood there in her mismatched pajamas, looking up, so much happening in the world around her. But there she was, awake in the middle of the night, quietly staring away from it all, letting time slow down for a moment.”
― Abbi Jacobson, I Might Regret This: Essays, Drawings, Vulnerabilities, and Other Stuff

“What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind?”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue