Lydia

“That night was the first time in my life I felt like the words “gay” and “alone” weren’t synonyms for each other.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“Because I know how that dog-eared page persists and insists you return to it. I know how the brain and the heart and the spirit fight daily to stay in the book and not write themselves out of the story. I know. I know. I know.”
― Bassey Ikpi, I'm Telling the Truth, but I'm Lying: Essays

“What we miss - what we lose and what we mourn - isn’t it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are. To say nothing of what we wanted in life but never got to have.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Friend

“It took me many years to realize that it’s hard to live in this world. I don’t mean the mechanics of living, because for most of us, our hearts will beat, our lungs will take in oxygen, without us doing anything at all to tell them to. For most of us, mechanically, physically, it’s harder to die than it is to live. But still we try to die. We drive too fast down winding roads, we have sex with strangers without wearing protection, we drink, we use drugs. We try to squeeze a little more life out of our lives. It’s natural to want to do that. But to be alive in the world, every day, as we are given more and more and more, as the nature of “what we can handle” changes and our methods for how we handle it change, too, that’s something of a miracle.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom