Tara Verdia

“I sometimes imagine meeting my seventeen-year-old self. She's still here inside me somewhere. Maybe one morning in the mirror, there she'll be. I look at her with affection and understanding and hope. She sees me and backs away in horror while I try to explain why I made the choices I made.”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“It is, after all, almost a miracle they are here. Not because they've survived the booze, the hashish, the migraines. Not that at all. It's that they've survived everything in life, humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life, to have made it to fifty and to have made it here: to this frosted-cake landscape, these mountains of gold, the little table they can now see sitting on the dune, set with olives and pita and glasses and wine chilling on ice, with the sun waiting more impatiently than any camel for their arrival. So, yes. As with almost any sunset, but with this one in particular: shut the fuck up.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less

“pull yourself
out
of your flesh.
burn down those walls.
uncover your bones

and see
how fiercely you bloom
when you let your body
breathe.
________

raw.”
― Vinati Bhola, Udaari: a collection of poems

“I didn't seem to know anyone as well as I thought I did. But I wonder now if maybe you can't ever truly know another person. Maybe all you can do is hope that one day, you'll know yourself.”
― Sarah Nicole Smetana, The Midnights