James X

“But it’s not just my eyes that suffer at dawn, it’s my heart that breaks. I feel the light that blazes across the city, striking my face but also warming my marrow, and as it rises I continue to look at my neighbors’ laundry, threadbare and bone-dry. Then I close my eyes so that I see the light through my eyelids, and I regret being typically sluggish and missing out on this extraordinary, everyday phenomenon”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts

“At that age, time moves slow. You're eager for something to happen, passing time in parking lots, hands deep in your pockets, trying to figure out where to go next. Life happened elsewhere, it was simply a matter of finding a map that led there. Or maybe, at that age, time moves fast; you're so desperate for action that you forget to remember things as they happen. A day felt like forever, a year was a geological era.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“it was a little like living in Moomin Valley, where the sun never sets. Days that were endless, but which you could only take one at a time, with no sense of what was coming tomorrow . . . I still can’t shake it. It lives inside me like a curse or a blessing.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, The Premonition

“I had never much cared about ancestry the way my parents spoke of it when we went back to India. There, ancestry meant unpronounceable names and impenetrable orthodoxies. But this gold digger felt viscerally like my forebear. What if this was my land, after all?”
― Sanjena Sathian, Gold Diggers: 'Magical and entirely original' —Shondaland