Carol Chen

“In the east," she says after a time, her gaze still downcast, "there is a tradition known as kintsukuroi. It is the practice of mending broken ceramic pottery using lacquer dusted with gold and silver and other precious metals. It is meant to symbolize that things can be more beautiful for having been broken."
"Why are you telling me this?" I ask.
At last she looks at me. Her irises are polished obsidian in the moonlight. "Because I want you to know," she says, "that there is life after survival.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“A line came into my mind, something that Hannah Arendt once said about the poet Auden: that life had manifested the heart's invisible furies on his face.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“We're not courting trouble," I say. "Flirting with it, at most.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue