"And from those brief moments I was living with a certainty that I was exactly where I should be, where everything is deeply quiet and deeply alive. I thought about the many aspects in this life that I could not control or understand despite how much I wanted to or tried. How my father’s life, my mother’s life, the lives around me and the figures from the past they are not mine to determine, not mine to map out no matter how much they shaped what I had become however much we were connected. I could only help in small ways, I could listen and piece together and recount. But what was truly mine was only a little, no, a miniscule speck of it all. And while this is a sort of devastation to me, when I knew it would take some time to fully accept, it felt nice at least to be on the way in spite of not knowing exactly how far I had come nor how far I have left to go."

"❝It is the nature of relationships that they are impossible to fully understand from the outside. Their inner workings both from memories and habits and histories made out of exterior world and from those known only between the two involved that exists only through them and are lost when they are lost to each other. A relationship is particular in the way people are particular. Whatever lesson one can glean from people’s relationships can only be taken in pieces assembled into bare minimal instructions. ❞"

"Colonialism looking and tasting better than it should. And should I be enjoying it as much as I am?"

"Jasmine and I look at each other, like, is she serious? Then Jasmine conveys to me, with a flutter of her eyelids, what do you expect, she’s not like us. Yes, sometimes we are this good at understanding one another. When our similarities align in a sort of power."

"It’s not a lack of confidence in oneself preventing people from going after jobs where they don’t meet all of the qualifications, but a lack of confidence in other people’s abilities to view them as capable of doing the job, and therefore hiring them,” said the leadership expert, who had surveyed one thousand people to come to this conclusion. “The main barrier is not a mistaken perception about themselves, but a mistaken perception of what is a real requirement or rule, of how processes like these truly work, and this is especially a problem for women."