Norma Vasquez

“The only moral, meaningful course for a civilization facing its own end: To learn how to ask forgiveness and to atone in some tiny measure for the devastating harm we had done to our human family and to our fellow creatures and to the beautiful earth. To love and forgive one another as best we could. And to learn how to say goodbye.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“I already knew the power of language to destroy, to omit, to obliterate. But poetry, the power of language to restore: this was what both Athos and Kostas were trying to teach me.”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

“I didn’t know that the attack on our story was going to be as effective as a brilliantly run national political campaign, because that is what it was: a political campaign. I didn’t know that we were being bombarded by an army of Bush backers with different divisions, different weapons, and different techniques, but always the same agenda: kill the messenger.”
― Mary Mapes, Truth and Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power

“Books seem to find me when I’m ready for them, or else I abandon them.”
― Jenn Shapland, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir