AUTUMN

“But we can’t always be what we want every second. And that’s okay. That’s just life”
― Alison Espach, The Wedding People

“And sometimes it seems clear to me that the normalcy most of us cling to so stubbornly—assuming it like a cloak against the changing weather—is also a paralysis. A blithe insistence on the continuity of daily life. It must go on, it can’t go on, it goes on.”
― Lydia Millet, We Loved It All: A Memory of Life

“I return to English as if to the arms of a lover and feel instantly safe and indigenous there. What are borders, anyway? Just lines in the sand. What are citizens? Just people fucking within the same lines in the sand - and their children and then their children”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“To wake up from a dream you have been dreaming since birth is powerful. But to wake up from a dream you have been dreaming from birth with almost a hundred million people, brothers and strangers alike, a collective nightmare, a nightmare we had been imbibing all our lives and passing around to one another, feeding innocently to our newborns—that we are worthless, that we deserve no better than the filth we live in . . . If there is a Judgment Day, this was it.”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English