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“To understand what a person means or says, it’s basically necessary to already know what that person means or is saying.”
― Jenny Erpenbeck, Go, Went, Gone

“That relative, that temporal plane -- where sensitivities vary, where no one has the same personal history even if they have the same communal history, where something which is a trigger for one person passes off unnoticed by another person -- definitely was the place where the raw living of life and the imperfect mental response to that raw living took place.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“This summer, it took one final conversation with Grandmama for me to understand that no one in our family and very few folk in this nation has any desire to reckon with the weight of where we've been. Which means no one in our family and very few folk in this nation wants to be free.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

“Within her there seems to be a rattling; from little stones, from stalks, from days when it never quits. Inside her the sky empties itself in slow, unresolving fashion, and there isn’t anything worth naming in the fridge.”
― Dorthe Nors, Spejl, skulder, blink