Lauren Flores

“This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“I sat against one of the house’s clay walls. The kinship I felt suddenly for the old land... it surprised me. I’d been gone long enough to forget and be forgotten. I had a home in a land that might as well be in another galaxy to the people sleeping on the other side of the wall I leaned against. I thought I had forgotten about this land. But I hadn’t. And, under the bony glow of a halfmoon, I sensed Afghanistan
humming under my feet. Maybe Afghanistan hadn’t forgotten me either. I looked westward and marveled that, somewhere over those mountains, Kabul still existed. It really existed, not just as an old memory, or as the heading of an AP story on page 15 of the San Francisco
Chronicle. Somewhere over those mountains in the west slept the city where my harelipped brother and I had run kites. Somewhere over there, the blindfolded man from my dream had died a needless death.
Once, over those mountains, I had made a choice. And now, a quarter of a century later, that choice had landed me right back on this soil.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“Thus, neither having the clue to the other’s secret, they were respectively puzzled at what each revealed, and awaited new knowledge of each other’s character and moods without attempting to pry into each other’s history.”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles

“How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath