Dax

“And I wish she knew that her ability to even utter all these doubts out loud means she thinks highly enough of herself to respect the emotions inside her. I would never let my doubts leave the prison of my brain.”
― Abdi Nazemian, Like a Love Story

“I pity who I was then: a girl riven by her mistake, beholden to the needs of others, and trained to disminish her own. I was a snake that had not yet learned to strike.”
― Marie Rutkoski, The Midnight Lie

“I had had no idea that people in the Ward were watching me, that they knew so much about me and they would miss me if I never returned. That they could even want me never to return.
It was a new thought to me: that you could take heart when someone escapes the trap that trapped you.
And yet it shouldn’t have been a new thought, since I had already felt this whenever I forged a passport. I had simply not realized that this was what I had felt.
I had put love into each stitch in each passport’s binding. I just hadn’t known that was what it was, because the only love I had recognized as given to me was the kind that clutched tight, and never let go.”
― Marie Rutkoski, The Midnight Lie

“Tell your story until it becomes woven into the fabric of our story. Write about the joys and the pain and every event and every artist who inspires you to dream. Tell your story, because if you don't, it could be wiped out. No one tells our stories for us. And one more thing. If you see an elderly person walking down the street, or across from you at a coffee shop, don't look away from them, don't dismiss them, and don't just ask them how they're doing. Ask them where they have been instead. And then listen. Because there's no future without a past.”
― Abdi Nazemian, Like a Love Story