Anu Khosla

“She was a mess. So what? We are all stinking messes, every last one of us, or we once were messes and found our way out, or we are trying to find our way out of a mess, scratching, reaching.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“I've never understood how so many barely literate people read the Bible so much. It's hard. In the same way it surprises me that uneducated seamstresses all over the world can figure out how to put in sleeves and zippers.”
― Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

“Time stops when someone dies. Of course it stops for them, maybe, but for the mourners time runs amok. Death comes too soon. It forgets the tides, the days growing longer and shorter, the moon. It rips up the calendar. You aren't at your desk or on the subway or fixing dinner for the children. You're reading People in a surgery waiting room, or shivering outside on a balcony smoking all night long. you stare into space, sitting in your childhood bedroom with the lobe on the desk... The bad part is that when you return to your ordinary life all the routines, the marks of the day, seem like senseless lies. all is suspect, a trick to lull us, rock us back into the placid relentlessness of time.”
― Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

“My legs! Lord Jesus stop the pain in my legs!”

“Hush John,” Florida said. “That’s only phantom pain.”

“Is it real?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “All pain is real.”
― Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories