To Paradise

by Hanya Yanagihara

Food was real, food was proof of life, of how your body was still yours, of how it still could and still would respond to whatever you put inside it, of how it could be made to work. To be hungry was to be alive, and to be alive was to need food.

You should always have a close friend you’re slightly afraid of.” Why? “Because it means that you’ll have someone in your life who really challenges you, who forces you to become better in some way, in whatever way you’re most scared of: Their approval is what’ll hold you accountable.”

How did having a child guarantee anything? What if your child didn’t like you? What if your child didn’t care about you? What if your child became a terrible adult, an association you were ashamed of? Then what? A person was the worst legacy, because a person was by definition unpredictable.

The ignorant person dies the same way as the educated one. It makes no difference in the end.”

the oppression that’s gone on since America was founded and will go on and on until it burns down to the ground and we begin something new.

None of our ancestors, our great-great-great-grandparents, ever woke up one day and thought: Let’s sail halfway around the world, be part of a land grab, pit ourselves against some other native peoples.

They were encouraged to be Christian so they would think something better awaited them in the afterlife, after years of being abused. Christianity was a form of mind control, and it still is.

What if the fertile person was physically or mentally unfit—would we still be encouraging them to have children?