Ben Cela

“Both fictions and memories are recalled and retold. They're both forms of stories. Stories are the way we learn. Stories are how we understand each other.”
― Iain Reid, I'm Thinking of Ending Things

“When you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”
― William Saroyan

“Just tell your story. Pretty much all memory is fiction and heavily edited. So just keep going.”
― Iain Reid, I'm Thinking of Ending Things

“But these old people in front of her tonight, they weren’t the future. They belonged to the past, and Margo had learned from bitter experience—not just with her mother, but with a whole generation of aunts and uncles and family friends and neighbors and acquaintances—that very few of them were willing to examine their fundamental beliefs about gender, let alone revise them so they could make room for trans people in their hearts and minds. It had gotten to the point where she had stopped even trying to argue with her older relatives; it just wasn’t worth the effort and the heartache. You just had to wait them out. They’d be gone before too long, taking their narrow-minded, uncharitable ideas along with them.”
― Tom Perrotta, Mrs. Fletcher