kanzad

“I’d lived with misunderstanding for so long, I’d stopped even viewing it as bad. It was just there, embedded in everything I loved.”
― Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties: Stories

“I thought about what I wanted to do now -- if I wanted to eat or leave the park, if I wanted to apply to grad school in the fall, if I wanted to find Ben in the crowd. Nothing sounded appealing, and I had the vague desire to slip through the cracks of what everyone else was doing.”
― Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties

“The way your mother rolls her eyes at you, your sudden decision to stop eating red meat, the immediate unexplainable sadness you felt when you saw your father’s shirt draped over the back of a chair. You can write it all down, you can put it in your book of facts, but the truth is no one can ever really understand the tangle of experiences and passions that makes you who you are. It’s a secret collection, a private language, a pebble in your pocket that you play with when you’re anxious, hard as geometry, smooth as soap.”
― Raphael Bob-Waksberg, Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory

“Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn't it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world's resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it's the very reason I root for us to survive - because we are so stupid about each other.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You