Riva Sciuto

“Life is not fair. You would be foolish to expect fairness, at least when it comes to matters of life and death, matters outside the scope of the law, matters that cannot be engineered or manipulated by human effort, matters that are distinctly the domain of God or luck or fate or some other unknowable, incomprehensible force.”
― Julie Yip-Williams, The Unwinding of the Miracle: A Memoir of Life, Death, and Everything That Comes After

“How long can you live with ghosts before deciding to become one? How long until the walls become clouds and the floor opens up like clear blue sky and there’s nowhere to go but your stone tower where you are the one who chooses who to haunt and how to haunt and when to haunt. You learn how to act, to pretend, to inhabit different forms in your mind, different faces to the world, some of them terrifying, some charming, some cunning, some innocent, some a hundred feet tall, godlike, and invincible, others tiny and frail, beseeching and ironic. Five, ten, ten thousand different ghosts of your creation, one for every person you meet, one for every occasion, so many that they crowd the hallways of your castle in the sky.

But somewhere within those imaginary walls, sitting alone in the dark above the clouds, you are aware that you are none of those things. Only sad.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“That’s the whole magic trick of an essence brought to life by a song, to become an artist when you feel broken and you’ve decided to turn it into beauty. To make the pain useful. The longing, the fear, the heartache and dread, the ability to see these broken pieces of yourself like cracks in an armor through which you are better able to see the world: too broken to be normal, just broken enough to see beauty.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“The worth of a person’s life lies not in the number of years lived; rather it rests on how well that person has absorbed the lessons of that life, how well that person has come to understand and distill the multiple, messy aspects of the human experience.”
― Julie Yip-Williams, The Unwinding of the Miracle: A Memoir of Life, Death, and Everything That Comes After