Everything Here Is Beautiful Quotes

“querencia. It refers to that place in the ring where a bull feels strongest, safest, where it returns again and again to renew its strength. It’s the place we’re most comfortable, where we know who we are—where we feel our most authentic selves.”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful

“It fascinates her, to see a creature so busy in an act of creation.”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful

“Our mother might've said this: that immigrants are the strongest, that we leave our homes behind and rebuild. Everywhere we go, we rebuild.”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful

“But the truth is, I'm still not sure how to tell what's real because when you're inside it, it's your reality, and if your own perception of the world isn't valid, then what is?”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful

“How trite, but true: things change. Some all at once, some over a lifetime.”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful

“But if she has to try too hard, perhaps its the universe's way of telling her this isn't to be. She doesn't believe in God, but she believes in a natural order, a higher directive, to be gleaned and mulled and acted upon.”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful

“He’s already run the standard battery of questions, checked the check boxes, computed the data: hears voices = schizophrenic; too agitated = paranoid; too bright = manic; too moody = bipolar; and of course everyone knows a depressive, a suicidal, and if you’re all-around too unruly or obstructive or treatment resistant like a superbug, you get slapped with a personality disorder, too. In Crote Six, they said I “suffer” from schizoaffective disorder. That’s like the sampler plate of diagnoses, Best of Everything.
But I don’t want to suffer. I want to live.”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful

“I would cherish this luxury of finding contentment in the mundane, revel in it like a guilty pleasure.”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful

“There was a word for this feeling; a Portuguese word he’d once learned from Lucia: saudade. A vague longing for something that cannot exist again, or perhaps never existed.”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful

“His desires remain inert, stuck in his heart. There is a word for this, a beautiful word that unfurls from the tongue: velleity. The weakest form of volition. A mere wish, unaccompanied by an effort to obtain it.”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful

“It seems silly, right? To be crying when everything's fine?'

Well, why not, I figure, because if pain and tears were correlated, surely we would've all drowned by now.”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful

“In grief, the future seems impossible.”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful

“love is just romantic way of explaining selflessness.”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful

“But I don’t want to suffer. I want to live.”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful

“She missed New York, the sheer wattage of the place, its mighty abundance, its chaos, its kinetic energy a comfort somehow.”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful

“Shortly after we met, my mother died. That day at her funeral, he stood beside me, I knew he was my angel. "Why are you crying?" I said, watching him wipe his eyes. "Why you are not crying?" he said. "Your mother is dead. You are daughter with no mother. I love you. Of course I cry.”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful

“There’s a word for this in Portuguese: saudade. It’s not exactly nostalgia, there’s more of a longing in it, for a feeling or way of life that may be impossible to recapture—that may or may not have even existed in the first place. “An indolent dreaming wistfulness” is how I’ve seen one writer describe it. Now that’s a great word.”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful

“Only later, much later, would he understand. Later, in hindsight, they would come together on this: to wonder when it had become impossible to distinguish which parts of Lucia fell under her own jurisdiction and which belonged to her illness.”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful

“Nurse Bob liked Miranda Bok. He liked her energy. He liked that she still had the fight. Too many family members came through the ward already wrung out by the system, slumped in their chairs, panning the room with dull eyes. No opinions, no hope, no fight.”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful

“This modest piece of local calm, sitting on a stoop after a family meal, I’m gripped with a strong déjà vu. Those years I traveled abroad, moments like these felt commonplace, but this one feels impossibly rare. There’s a word for this in Portuguese: saudade. It’s not exactly nostalgia, there’s more of a longing in it, for a feeling or way of life that may be impossible to recapture—that may or may not have even existed in the first place.”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful

“When the serpents come, they seize control via the heart, erase all self-doubt, and life exists only day to day. In those moments, it makes perfect sense to succumb to them and their unwavering conviction.”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful

“Oh, young lives yearning for drama, while nothing much is at stake”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful

“Our mother might’ve said this: that immigrants are the strongest, that we leave our homes behind and rebuild. Everywhere we go, we rebuild.”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful

“Empathy: because the commonality among human beings is emotion, and the only way we can bridge our vast discrepancies in experience is through what we feel. Let us be humbled in the knowledge that one may never fully understand the interior lives of others—but let us continue to care.”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful

“Narratives of mental illness are often white and middle-class, yet mental illness does not discriminate—it devastates regardless of race, gender, and ethnicity. Was it important for you to challenge that narrative, and to have a wide cast of characters from different backgrounds?”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful

“He invited her to the campo. She politely declined. She could not bear to face the scrutiny of a family of strangers. He did not press. He understood.”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful

“In New York he tried to steal from me so many times, he makes trouble in the neighborhood, he gets his ass arrested. I say to his mother, how am I supposed to help a kid like this? I have to send him away, he’s gonna get himself killed here. She says, you are not sending him back, he is teenager and she is not wanting him in the Israeli army,”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful

“Reveal Lucia’s intentions to run off with their child. But truly, she did not know what he would do if he knew. Fly into a rage? Kick Lucia out? Forbid her from ever seeing her daughter again? To tell him the truth would poison whatever relationship he and Lucia had—and then what would happen to Lucia?”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful

“She sees how it is, this scheme against women, to make a woman ask a man for permission to go somewhere with her own blood-child. For nine months, she grew the child in her belly, and who has the right to say what she can or cannot do with her child?”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful

“She believes this is true. If she’s gone, Manny will find someone else. A younger woman, perhaps, who will love him truly, and he deserves this kind of love, just as she does, and it will be easier if she is gone. Essy is young, she will forget quickly. Better now than later, like Nipa said. So she will tell him one night after their daughter is in bed and he is sitting in the kitchen, relaxed, shelling peanuts and watching”
― Mira T. Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful