Debojit Kakoti

“Never feel that you’re obliged to show your pain to the world,” she said. “Very few people deserve to see your tears.”
― Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow

“I may not find joy every day. Some days will just be hard, and I will simply exist, and that’s okay, too. No one should have to be happy all the time—no one can be, with the ways in which life throws curveballs at us. On those days, it’s important not to mourn the lack of joy but to remember how it feels, to remember that to feel at all is one of the greatest gifts we have in life. When that doesn’t work, we can remind ourselves that the absence of joy isn’t permanent; it’s just the way life works sometimes. The reality of disability and joy means accepting that not every day is good but every day has openings for small pockets of joy.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

“(...) the so-called democratization of reviews means the lowering of standards, and that subject knowledge, history and critical context are at risk of being lost in favour of people who only know how to write in attention-seeking soundbites.”
― Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other

“She realised that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library