“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”
Thank you for flying all the way here to see me. And fuck you for not telling me you were coming. Thank you for all the small, silly, little things you did for me as a kid, you know? Like hiding notes in my lunch box and putting googly eyes on the fruit at the supermarket. And fuck you for not working on yourself or seeking help after we lost dad. And for not talking to me about it either. Just tossing over the whole thing and acting like everything was all right.
“my battery is low and it’s getting dark” is so hauntingly human, so crushingly lonely. I can’t articulate the deep, profound ache that sentence evokes. It’s acceptance and defeat and terror and sadness all at once, all from one tiny machine we asked to explore the stars for us.
“Most civilization is based on cowardice. It’s so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice. You water down the standards which would lead to bravery. You restrain the will. You regulate the appetites. You fence in the horizons. You make a law for every movement. You deny the existence of chaos. You teach even the children to breathe slowly. You tame.”
— Leto Atreides II, The Stolen Journals, God Emperor of Dune
“Alexander lures you in and endears you to Kofi and his world in a way that has you fully invested in time and place…His writing is at once vivid and simple, lyrical and surgical, expressive and exacting, comforting and cutting.
It hypnotizes and sobers, hypnotizes and sobers, in a rhythm as timeless as the talking drum that carries the tales of his people: Kum-PUM PUM! Kum-PUM PUM! I wish this book existed alongside Huckleberry Finn when I was in school. I am glad it exists now!” ―Lupita Nyong’o
— Anaïs Nin, from The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 6: 1955-1966
[Image Transcription: I fear my anger. So I displace it, attach it to peripheral places or people. The real problem is what to do with the anger. I have stifled it so long that I have packed it like dynamite, I have stored it and now it threatens to come out in explosions I fear.]
“If I have learned anything over this last year it’s that you have to live your own life too so that if something we hoped for doesn’t work out, you still have two legs to stand on, you still have your own path.”
“How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn’t they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?”
