Carl

“This is your heritage,' he said, as if from this dance we could know about his own childhood, about the flavor and grit of tenement buildings in Spanish Harlem, and projects in Red Hook, and dance halls, and city parks, and about his own Paps, how he beat him, how he taught him to dance, as if we could hear Spanish in his movements, as if Puerto Rico was a man in a bathrobe, grabbing another beer from the fridge and raising it to drink, his head back, still dancing, still steeping and snapping perfectly in time.”
― Justin Torres, We the Animals

“When we are young... we often experience things in the present with a nostalgia-in-advance, but we seldom guess what we will truly prize years from now.”
― Edmund White, City Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960s and 70s

“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”
― E.E. Cummings

“What we gotta do is, we gotta figure out a way to reverse gravity, so that we all fall upward, through the clouds and sky, all the way to Heaven.”
― Justin Torres