Mimi Hayes

“Kindness connects to who you are, while niceness connects to how you want to be seen.”
― David Levithan, Every Day

“Much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said.”
― Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

“I wake up thinking of yesterday. The joy is in remembering; the pain is in knowing it was yesterday.”
― David Levithan, Every Day

“Do you ever think when you look at someone, when to you listen to someone, does that person really have a life?" Abdul was asking the boy who was not listening. "Like that woman who just went to hang herself, or her husband, who probably beat her before she did this? I wonder what kind of life is that," Abdul went on. "I go through tensions just to see it. But it is a life. Even the person who lives like a dog still has a kind of life. Once when my mother was beating me, and that thought came to me. I said, 'If what is happening now, you beating me, is to keep happening for the rest of my life, it would be a bad life, but it would be a life, too.' And my mother was so shocked when I said that. She said, "Don't confuse yourself by thinking about such terrible lives.'" Sunil though that he, too, had a life. A bad life, certainly-the kind that could be ended as Kalu's had been and then forgotten, because it made no difference to the people who lived in the overcity. But something he'd come to realize on the roof, leaning out, thinking about what would happen if he leaned to far, was that a boy's life could still matter to himself.”
― Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity