E Gonzalez

“When I got back home I told my grandmother everything, detail by detail, and she savored it. I had been to the old country. 'I used to love the crepe myrtles and camellias. You don't see those anywhere like Alabama.' She didn't cry, she didn't look wistful; she turned her head and changed the subject. Once she left Alabama, she never went back. The heart of Dixie was her Poland.”
― Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South

“He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was difficult for him to trace the beauty that had made him pick and so destroy it”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“A lifetime of glory is worth a moment of pain. Louie thought: Let go.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption

“I cried so hard that if my present crying self could go back in time and see my other crying selves, it would slap them and say, “That shit’s not worth crying for.” My cry was not a cry of sadness. It was not catharsis. It wasn’t me feeling sorry for myself. It was an expression of raw pain that came from an inability of my body to express that pain in any other way, shape, or form. She was my mom. She was my teammate. It had always been me and her together, me and her against the world. When Andrew said, “shot her in the head,” I broke in two.”
― Trevor Noah