Miriam Kumaradoss-Hohauser

“Joy" is such a flimsy feel-good word. I'm talking instead about what can be wrestled from otherwise uncomfortable circumstances and be repurposed, anywhere a flat surface can be fashioned. I want a gift like this at every entry to every unfamiliar place.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

“Abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs. They just need to want something and not care how they get it.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“Many people think that death is the end. The ending of pain, of hate, of love. But these things are not so easy to erase. Any kind of wanting leaves a scar. The living are good at forgetting, the years smoothing out memories until all the days of their lives are nothing but rolling planes of sameness. But in Hell, it is always just yesterday that everything was lost. The dead do not forget.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“I have wanted to die enough times in my life to understand the idea that wanting to die is not a foolish thing... I don't mean to prop up the idea of wanting an exit, but for me, not to imagine it as a foolish means that I am, by default, tasked with taking it seriously. I can't live as I once did, telling people that I was doing fine and desperately wanting them to wade through the language and see that I was in pain.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance