Ausma

“Perfect. Imperfect. A pair of adjectives that come over and again, in all seasons, day in and day out, taunting us, judging us, isolating us, turning our isolation into illness. Is there a more accomplished adjective than perfect? Perfect is free from comparison, perfect rejects superlative. We can always be good, do better, try our best, but how perfect can we be before we can love ourselves and let others love us? And who, my dear child, has taken the word lovable out of your dictionary and mine, and replaced it with perfect?”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“All I know is that I've wasted all these years looking for something, a sort of trophy I'd get only if I really, really did enough to deserve it. But I don't want it anymore, I want something else now, something warm and sheltering, something I can turn to, regardless of what I do, regardless of who I become. Something that will just be there, always, like tomorrow's sky.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans

“I gaze at his face night and day I hold his face in he grip of my eyes I double each breath of his with one of mine and I work relentlessly I secrete a thread with my nerves each millimetre of this thread wears me down to the heart but I move forward and I display a unique capacity for work stitch after stitch I sew and create the being who cannot not be, this creation is infinite but always the blow comes where it is not anticipated I believe him to be strong and suddenly
He tears himself.
And my body is empty right down to the heart.”
― Hélène Cixous, Tomb(e)

“Because you were foolish enough to love one place,
now you are homeless, an orphan
in succession of shelters.”
― Louise Glück, Poems, 1962-2012