Alexandra

“Being indebted is to be cautious, inhibited, and to never speak out of turn. It is to lead a life constrained by choices that are never your own. The man or woman who feels comfortable holding court at a dinner party will speak in long sentences, with heightened dramatic pauses, assured that no one will interject while they’re mid-thought, whereas I, who am grateful to be invited, speak quickly in clipped compressed bursts, so that I can get a word in before I’m interrupted.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“A concrete chip, a slab really, heavy on one side, the half side, the side not white. As for your mom's side, as for your whiteness, there's too much and not enough there to know what to do with. You're from a people who took and took and took and took. And from a people taken. You were both and neither.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“When asked about the difficulties of sculpture, Michelangelo said, “It is easy. You just chip away all the stone that isn’t David.” It’s simple to cut things out of a life. You break up with a shitty partner, quit eating bread, delete the Twitter app. You cut it out, and the shape of what’s actually killing you clarifies a little. The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t fuck or steal or kill, and you’ll be a good person. Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands. A rich man goes a whole day without killing a single homeless person and so goes to sleep content in his goodness. In another world, he’s buying crates of socks and Clif bars and tents, distributing them in city centers. But for him, abstinence reigns. I want to be the chisel, not the David. What can I make of being here? And what can I make of not?”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“I was seen—I who was seldom seen by anyone. I who was taught, by you, to be invisible in order to be safe, who, in elementary school, was sent to the fifteen-minute time-out in the corner only to be found two hours later, when everyone was long gone and Mrs. Harding, eating lunch at her desk, peered over her macaroni salad and gasped, "My god! My god, I forgot you were still here! What are you still doing here?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous