Krista

“A week before arriving at the beach, I told her about the protest I had passed in New Hampshire. "I am mad because my stupid, stupid president is a sausage," I'd said. "He cut the money for the radio and TV shows where women wear a bonnet."
"Let's talk about something else," she suggested, clearly uncomfortable.”
― David Sedaris, The Land and Its People

“He told Yusuf how the ancient Greeks were puzzled over what happened to birds when the days turned mercurial and cold winds began to blow down from the mountains. They searched the empty skies, trying to find clues as to where they might be hiding, all those black kites, grey geese, starlings, swallows and swifts. Unaware of migration patterns, the philosophers of antiquity came up with their own explanation. Every winter, they claimed, birds metamorphosed into fish.
And the fish, he said, were happy in their new environment. Food was plentiful in the water, life less grueling. But they could never forget where they came from and the way they used to solar above the earth, light and free. Nothing could replace that feeling. So when the longing became too much to bear, every year around springtime, the fish changed back into birds. And thus they refilled the firmament, all those black kites, grey geese, starlings, swallows and swifts.
For a while things worked fine and they were thrilled to be back home in familiar skies, until frost gathered on tree branches and they had to return once again to the waters down below, where they would feel safe but never complete, and thus it went on and on, the cycle of fish and birds, birds and fish. The cycle of belonging and exile.
It was the age-old question: whether to leave or to stay. That fateful night, Yusuf and Yiorgos chose to stay.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“The upstairs bedrooms supplied office space and a balcony looking down on the audience, a long, narrow gallery that accommodated the control panel for the house lights and stage lighting, an area strung so densely with conduit and thick wires that it looked like a den for families of sociably oriented boa constrictors.”
― Shirley Rousseau Murphy, Cat Laughing Last

“Don't let your circumstances extinguish you.”
― Karin Tanabe, A Woman of Intelligence