LH

“They were human, and the longer they worked there, the more often they found themselves in situations that forced them to ask the same questions over and over again. Is it worth it, doing incremental good in an imperfect system? Can you be a good person and work somewhere where something like this happens? Paul and many of the employees at Crownsville remind me of a story I grew up hearing from the Caribbean side of my family. One of my aunts in particular loved the Starfish Story. Legend has it that a young Black boy—in Haiti or Cuba or the Dominican Republic, you choose—is walking along a beach that is littered with starfish. Thousands upon thousands of starfish have washed up onto the shore following a terrible storm and they are helpless, dehydrating in the sun. So the little boy begins picking the starfish up one by one and throwing them back into their home in the water. Other people at the beach look at the boy, laugh, and call him naive. One person approaches him and tells him bluntly, “Give up. It makes no difference. You’ll never be able to save all of these starfish.” The boy pauses for a second. He looks up, then leans back down to toss another starfish into the sea. “It makes a difference for that one.” Many of the people of Crownsville decided that it was better to throw as many starfish back into the ocean as they could rather than abandon them all on the shore.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“I held my hands outstretched, catching snowflakes, watching them vanish on my fingertips. It felt joyous and frustrating and spoke to some truth I couldn’t express; my vocabulary was too limited, my words too loose a net in which to catch it. Somehow grasping at vanishing snowflakes is like grasping at happiness: an act of possession that instantly gives way to nothing.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient

“Nothing in the world seems of sufficient importance to be worth the doing. As I knew that the only cure for this sort of thing was work, I went amongst the patients.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula (The Gothic Chronicles Collection): Deluxe Edition

“HOW DO YOU picture yourself in your mind? Do you see your child self, all wide eyes, beaming smile, and chubby cheeks? Or are you forever your high school photo, rocking the best skin, hair, figure of your life. Maybe you see yourself on your wedding day, or focus on your identity as a young parent, holding your toddler’s hand? At a certain point, we continue to physically change in real life, while slowly but surely freezing into a single static image in our heads. The identity we liked the best? The person we wished we were still? Or some amalgamation, a fleeting moment when all of the pieces of ourselves, the different roles from different ages all lock into place and we feel our most true. Yes, some voice whispers in the back of your mind. This is me. And having achieved such nirvana, we hold it tight, while averting our gaze from any reflective surface that might tell us differently.”
― Lisa Gardner, Still See You Everywhere