Shannon Burdett

“A person with a journeying, experimental soul should be living a life that allowed for it. The past wasn’t my fault; of course I had been using prefab structures—not knowing any better—but now I was older and could see my new path clearly, extending from tonight and ending when I died. I get it, I whispered into the darkness. And thank you, I added, because we hadn’t talked in a while.”
― Miranda July, All Fours

“Why does even the best person hold back something from another? Why not say directly what we feel if we know that what we entrust won’t be scattered to the winds? As it is, everyone looks much tougher than he really is, as if he felt it’d be an insult to his feeling if he expressed them too readily.”
― Fydor Dostoyevsky

“Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Everyone—all my patients—think they’re supposed to play it cool about these changes”—now she was checking my moles—“but ‘freaking out’ actually plays an important role in transitions. Picture how the vaginal canal squeezes the water out of a baby’s lungs—it’s the shock of this squeezing and the sudden cold air that makes the baby cry out and take their first breath!” She inhaled so I inhaled, too. “The trauma itself prepares them for the next phase, life on Earth.” The next phase. Right. Now that I wasn’t crying out about the cliff (the slide, the stairs, whatever) I could wonder about what came after.”
― Miranda July, All Fours