DeAndre Oliver

“Calling love a philosophy is like calling the air we breathe a philosophy or the water we drink a philosophy or the ground we stand on a philosophy. Love is the very foundation of human existence.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Revolution Indomable

“We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers.”
― Bayard Rustin

“If you erased your past mistakes, you could purge your regrets with them, but you’d also wipe any lessons learned and any subsequent maturity gained. Don’t regret the minefields you stepped into, just try and learn not to step into the same one twice.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Parents, she thought, learned to survive touching their children less and less. As a baby Pearl had clung to her; she’d worn Pearl in a sling because whenever she’d set her down, Pearl would cry. There’d scarcely been a moment in the day when they had not been pressed together. As she got older, Pearl would still cling to her mother’s leg, then her waist, then her hand, as if there was something in her mother she needed to absorb through the skin. Even when she had her own bed, she would often crawl into Mia’s in the middle of the night and burrow under the old patchwork quilt, and in the morning they would wake up tangled, Mia’s arm pinned beneath Pearl’s head, or Pearl’s legs thrown across Mia’s belly. Now, as a teenager, Pearl’s caresses had become rare—a peck on the cheek, a one-armed, half-hearted hug—and all the more precious because of that. It was the way of things, Mia thought to herself, but how hard it was. The occasional embrace, a head leaned for just a moment on your shoulder, when what you really wanted more than anything was to press them to you and hold them so tight you fused together and could never be taken apart. It was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds, core, and all.”
― Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere