Jessica

“Once upon a time they was two girls," I say. "one girl had black skin, one girl had white."
Mae Mobley look up at me. She listening.
"Little colored girl say to little white girl, 'How come your skin be so pale?' White girl say, 'I don't know. How come your skin be so black? What you think that mean?'
"But neither one a them little girls knew. So little white girl say, 'Well, let's see. You got hair, I got hair.'"I gives Mae Mobley a little tousle on her head.
"Little colored girl say 'I got a nose, you got a nose.'"I gives her little snout a tweak. She got to reach up and do the same to me.
"Little white girl say, 'I got toes, you got toes.' And I do the little thing with her toes, but she can't get to mine cause I got my white work shoes on.
"'So we's the same. Just a different color', say that little colored girl. The little white girl she agreed and they was friends. The End."
Baby Girl just look at me. Law, that was a sorry story if I ever heard one. Wasn't even no plot to it. But Mae Mobley, she smile and say, "Tell it again.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“Fumbling in the dark, Josie reached underneath the frame of her bed for the plastic bag she’d
stashed-her supply of sleeping pills. She was no better than any of the other stupid people in this
world who thought if they pretended hard enough, they could make it so. She’d thought that death
could be an answer, because she was too immature to realize it was the biggest question of all.
Yesterday, she hadn’t known what patterns blood could make when it sprayed on a whitewashed
wall. She hadn’t understood that life left a person’s lungs first, and their eyes last. She had pictured
suicide as a final statement, a fuck you to the people who hadn’t understood how hard it was for her
to be the Josie they wanted her to be. She’d somehow thought that if she killed herself, she’d be
able to watch everyone else’s reaction; that she’d get the last laugh. Until yesterday, she hadn’t
really understood. Dead was dead. When you died, you did not get to come back and see what you
were missing. You didn’t get to apologize. You didn’t get a second chance.
Death wasn’t something you could control. In fact, it would always have the upper hand.”
― Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes

“Every picture ever taken is a fraction of a second, frozen in time forever.”
― G.J. Walker-Smith, Saving Wishes

“Decide that you want it more than you're afraid of it”
― Bill Cosby