Aaden Friday

“We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.”
― Audre Lorde

“The older sisters all had tacky taste: brocade curtains and brightly painted accent walls, mimicking the tropical colonial style of the country they’d left behind and the era in which they’d left it. Camila didn’t need textile reminders of home. She’d arrived like a bird that was molting.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Family Lore

“What if it wasn’t the crash that made us, but the debris?”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“We were exchanging truths, I realized, which is to say, we were cutting one another.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous