Elizabeth Jackson

“few weeks after James died, I wrote to Jane, a colleague who works in theater: “Our life seems to have entered the realm of Shakespearean dramas or Greek tragedies.” And she replied: “Your losses are indeed epic and unfathomably hard; no language of mine can meet that.” And yet life is still to be lived, inside tragedies, outside tragedies, and despite tragedies. Writing this book is a way to separate myself from that strange realm while simultaneously settling myself permanently into that realm.”
― Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow

“And this, among other reasons, is why I am against the word “grief,” which in contemporary culture seems to indicate a process that has an end point: the sooner you get there, the sooner you prove yourself to be a good sport at living, and the less awkward people around you will feel. Sometimes people ask me where I am in the grieving process, and I wonder whether they understand anything at all about losing someone. How lonely the dead would feel, if the living were to stand up from death’s shadow, clap their hands, dust their pants, and say to themselves and to the world, I am done with my grieving; from this point on it’s life as usual, business as usual.”
― Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow

“This is Sonia. She returned from America because it’s lonely,” said Babita. “It wasn’t simply loneliness,” said Sonia”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“These nigilistki, the nihilist women of the 1860s, were deadly serious about living their convictions. They wore their hair short and their dresses dark and plain because they didn’t want to be decorative objects. They studied and developed their minds and personalities and demanded respect from their male peers—often successfully. Preaching total freedom in love and sex, they wed their radical brethren in sham marriages to escape their parents’ control.12”
― Julia Ioffe, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy – A National Book Award Finalist: Women's Stories of Idealism, War, and Sacrifice