aina

“I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is
alone.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“There’s something about a book you find by accident, a book no one else seems to have heard of, a book that thrills and then becomes a part of you, when it’s one you so easily might never have read at all—it seems like it found you.”
― Lisa Tuttle, My Death

“It amazed me to see how quickly they got comfortable in the new apartment and settled into a routine, as if their lives had simply been excised and replaced elsewhere, intact, with just a dusting of grief they shook off before returning to the business of living. Maybe it was easier because the trauma of forced displacement was already well-known to them, and they understood how idleness and purposelessness could dull the mind, droop the eyelids, and seep too much sleep and despair into the day. They were experienced refugees, better equipped to handle recurring generational trauma.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“The cruel thing about grief is that it doesn’t care where you are or how you’re feeling. Out of nowhere, a random memory descends, even if your mind has been running a hundred miles an hour over the hundred things on your to-do list. The memory could be of the most mundane, ordinary day, and still, it’ll send an ancient sadness through you. The sort of sadness you imagine humans have felt since creation, but that you never imagined you could experience so deep inside.”
― Ruben Reyes Jr., There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven: A Collection of Short Stories of Fantasy, Migration, and Central American Identity