☆ Katie ☆

“Why were we all hoarding love, stockpiling it, when it was all around us, moving in and out of us like the air, if only we could feel it?”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“My parents' silences about many things alarmed me. They made me aware of invisible lines that I couldn't see that they drew between themselves and the rest of the world. I never knew when that line might be drawn to exclude me.”
― May-lee Chai, Useful Phrases for Immigrants: Stories

“Growing up in our home, there was no conflict between science and spirituality. My parents taught me that nature as revealed by science was a source of great, stirring pleasure. Logic, evidence, and proof did not detract from the feeling that something was transcendent—quite the opposite. It was the source of its magnificence.”
― Sasha Sagan, For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World

“I had prayed for this kind of soft joy, this kind of contentment, a day like this followed by more days like this, and finally having it was like being born, only instead of not remembering what it was like to be born, I was fully cognizant and participating in my own creation and suddenly it was clear to me why we don’t remember what it was like to be born—because it would give us too much insight into what it will be like to die. To be present for your own birth was suicide. To know the true wonder of suddenly existing was to know the true fear of suddenly ceasing to exist. They had to occur together and there was no prayer for what I knew in my flaky soul—that there was no way to escape the fear. It would always be there, amplifying joy and stealing from it. Still, it was tempting to sink into it, to roll around in its outer rings where occasionally the fear converted to a kind of happiness that turned an entire afternoon into an image that would stay forever, loom forever, return forever.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart