Candace

“We are the memories we don't remember, which live in us, which we feel, which make us sing and dance and pray the way we do, feelings from memories that flare and bloom unexpectedly in our lives like blood through a blanket from a wound made by a bullet fired by a man shooting us in the back for our hair, for our heads, for a bounty, or just to get rid of us.”
― Tommy Orange, There There

“Me gustan las enchiladas y la Coca-Cola y el Cha Cha Cha. Nor did you speak the truth when you learned a language; you said whatever you could with the words you had, and you spent a long while in kindergarten simplicity, in the sunshine of the perpetual present tense, the way the Buddhists prescribed. Wasn’t”
― Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

“Brian Doyle about the Irish custom of “taking to the bed.”

He says “In Irish culture, taking to the bed with a gray heart is not considered especially odd. People did and do it for understandable reasons—ill health, or the black dog, or, most horrifyingly, to die during An Gorta Mor, the great hunger, when whole families took to their beds to slowly starve…And in our time: I know a woman who took to her bed for a week after September eleventh, and people who have taken to their beds for days on end to recover from shattered love affairs, the death of a child, a physical injury that heals far faster than the psychic wound gaping under it. I’ve done it myself twice, once as a youth and once as a man, to think through a troubled time in my marriage. Something about the rectangularity of the bed, perhaps, or supinity, or silence, or timelessness; for when you are in bed but not asleep there is no time, as lovers and insomniacs know.

Yet, anxious, heartsick, we take to the bed, saddled by despair and dissonance and disease, riddled by muddledness and madness, rattled by malaise and misadventure, and in the ancient culture of my forbears this was not so unusual….For from the bed we came and to it we shall return, and our nightly voyages there are nutritious and restorative, and we have taken to our beds for a thousand other reasons, loved and argued and eater and seethed there, and sang and sobbed and suckled, and burned with fevers and visions and lust, and huddled and howled and curled and prayed. As children we all, every one of us, pretended the bed was a boat; so now, when we are so patently and persistently and daily at sea, why not seek a ship? p. 119-20

Brian Doyle in The Wet Engine: Exploring the Mad Wild Miracle of the Heart, p. 90-91”
― Brian Doyle, The Wet Engine: Exploring Mad Wild Miracle of Heart

“Poor breathing is to low energy as bad air filter is to low car performance.”
― Sukhraj S. Dhillon, The Power of Breathing