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A promise is a promise, yet, in the end, it is only that.

So, Anthony Veasna. "Three Women of Chuck's Donuts". The New Yorker; February 10th, 2020.

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All we can do is breathe the air of the period we live in, carry with us the special burdens of the time, and grow up within those confines. That's just how things are.

Murakami, Haruki. "Abandoning a Cat". The New Yorker; October 7th, 2019.

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Often people attempt to live their lives backwards; they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want so that they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then, do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.

Margaret Youngmich

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Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace, and power in it.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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Here is my experience. Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you. What you want to live and be happy in the world is a woman who has her own life and lets you have yours.

BORIS - Tartt, Donna. The Goldfinch. Little, Brown and Company, 2013.

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To point out that works of art were beautiful did not justify their creators. Pearls were beautiful but only diseased oysters had them.

Crisp, Quentin. The Naked Civil Servant. Penguin, 1997.

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The death of a parent, he wrote, “despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago. We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean’s bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections.

Didion, Joan. The Year of Magical Thinking. Knopf, 2005. E-book.

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People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist's office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly make the take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved.

Didion, Joan. The Year of Magical Thinking. Knopf, 2005. E-book.

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Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language. Why are my sides so sore and achy? It's from crying, I'm told. I did not know that we cry with our muscles. The pain is not surprising, but its physicality is, my tongue unbearably bitter, as though I ate a loathed meal and forgot to clean my teeth, on my chest a heavy, awful weight, and inside my body a sensation of eternal dissolving. My heart—my actual physical heart, nothing figurative here—is running away from me, has become its own separate thing, beating too fast, its rhythms at odds with mine. This is an affliction not merely of the spirit but of the body. Flesh, muscles, organs are all compromised. No physical position is comfortable. For weeks, my stomach is in turmoil, tense and tight with foreboding, the ever-present certainty that somebody else will die, that more will be lost. One morning, Okey calls me a little earlier than usual, and I think, Just tell me, tell me immediately, who has died now. Is it Mummy?

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “Notes on Grief." The New Yorker. 10 September 2020.

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The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their entire life in the hands of some other person. For this purpose they frequently choose someone who doesn't even want the beastly thing...I feel that, though no one must ever deny his dependence on others, development of character consists solely in moving towards self-sufficiency.

Crisp, Quentin. The Naked Civil Servant. Penguin, 1997.

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I never like to watch people sleep. They are so whole and vulnerable. It’s impossible to hate them when they sleep, but seeing the body unconscious, seeing the balls of intention hidden by their eyelids and the wit and the weakness gone from their faces, is frightening. It makes me think of death.

Dunn, Katherine. “The Resident Poet.” The New Yorker. 11 May 2020.

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...You won’t find your dead in the graves or the bones or the latrine. That’s not where they’re waiting for you. They’re inside you. They survive only in you, and you survive only through them. But from now on you’ll find all your strength in them—there’s no other choice, and no one can take that strength away from you. With that strength, you can do things you might not even imagine today. Like it or not, the death of our loved ones has fuelled us���not with hate, not with vengefulness, but with an energy that nothing can ever defeat. That strength lives in you. Don’t let anyone try to tell you to get over your loss, not if that means saying goodbye to your dead. You can’t - they’ll never leave you, they’ll stay by your side to give you the courage to live, to triumph over obstacles, whether here in Rwanda or abroad, if you go back. They’re always beside you, and you can always depend on them.

Mukasonga, Scholastique. “Grief”. The New Yorker; June 22nd, 2020.

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