Julia Thomas-Singh

“when you fall asleep in that sort of love you wake up with bruises on your neck”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“Could love, like pain, migrate to a different part of the body?”
― Uzma Aslam Khan, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali

“I'd been missing this, the ease of being with someone without speaking, without suppressing speech. I'd grown up with it in Karachi, where groups of men will congregate in the smallest spaces -- the grass between houses, a roundabout -- spaces made more generous through companionable silence. It existed between women too, this bond. My sister and her friends could spend hours reclining together on a bed, or a carpet. If secrets were murmured, it happened in a style so intuited it was pre-verbal. I hadn't experienced this very much in the West, where it seemed people had a reason for everything, including intimacy.”
― Uzma Aslam Khan

“The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure. She had believed in her own inherent goodness, her humanity, and lived accordingly, never causing anyone harm. Her devotion to doing things the right way had been unflagging, all her successes had depended on it, and she would have gone on like that indefinitely. She didn't understand why, but faced with those decaying buildings and straggling grasses, she was nothing but a child who had never lived.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian