Mallory

“while I watch her hands, and face,
feeling like she's talking directly to me.
She's saying the thoughts I didn't know anyone else had.

We're different, this poet and I. In looks, in body,
in background. But I don't feel so different
when I listen to her. I feel heard.
-Xiomara”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”
― Roald Dahl, The Twits

“The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”
― John Updike