Lisa Cook

“We would figure out what we liked, what we didn't, what was fun and what was painful through trial and error. If we kept shrinking back, worrying about how others saw us, trying not to show the uncool parts of ourselves or avoid being laughed at, we would probably lose sight of what those things even meant.

That was why, from here on out, step by step, I was going to decide who I was.”
― Michiko Aoyama, The Healing Hippo of Hinode Park

“There will always be good white people who love him and want the best for him but who are more afraid of other white people than of letting him down. It is easier for them to let it happen and to triage the wound later than to introduce an element of the unknown into the situation. No matter how good they are, no matter how loving, they will always be complicit, a danger, a wound waiting to happen. There is no amount of loving that will ever bring Miller closer to him in this respect. There is no amount of desire. There will always remain a small space between them, a space where people like Roman will take root and say ugly, hateful things to him. It’s the place in every white person’s heart where their racism lives and flourishes, not some vast open plain but a small crack, which is all it takes. Wallace presses his tongue flat. “Good white people,” he says.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“I honestly don't know what's happened to you," Ellen continued. "When you were little you had all these interests. It was such a thrill, as your mother, to watch you doing your things, and imagine the person you'd grow up to be. And I'm not talking about some hotshot success at the top of his field - just a person who was engaged in the world, who had a thing he was passionate about doing. I want that for you, George, I want you to wake up in the morning and be excited to get out of bed and do whatever it is that you're passionate about. Or at least get out of bed and do it, even on the days you're not excited about it. I think you'd find there's a certain dignity in that, just getting up and doing what's expected of you, all the more so when it's not what you want to be doing, or what you expected out of life.”
― Kate Greathead, The Book of George

“You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you've found life. I'm no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are 'yours' and which are 'mine.' It's past sorting out. We're both being someone new now, someone incredible….”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow