“You spoke carefully, as if the story was a flame in your hands in the wind.
...I wanted to cry but did not yet know how to in English. So I did nothing.
That was the day I learned how dangerous a colour can be.
...Even if colour is nothing but what the light reveals, that nothing has laws, and a boy on a pink bike must learn, above all else, the law of gravity.”
Source: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
“You always tell me it’s too late for you to read...you’d just like to rest now. That reading is a privilege you made possible for me with what you lost.”
Source: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
“Life is painful and messed up. It gets complicated at the worst of times, and sometimes you have no idea where to go or what to do. Lots of times people just let themselves get lost, dropping into a wide open, huge abyss. But that's why we have to keep trying. We have to push through all that hurts us, work past all our memories that are haunting us. Sometimes the things that hurt us are the things that make us strongest. A life without experience, in my opinion, is no life at all. And that's why I tell everyone that, even when it hurts, never stop yourself from living.”
“And I let him run his mind. I let him empty. I didn't stop him because you don't stop nothing when you're nine.”
Source: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
“Sometimes you don’t let yourself know what you know.”
Source: My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Vol. 1
“...telling her the story of a girl who ran away from her faceless youth only to name herself after a flower that opens like something torn apart.”
Source: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
“Even when you looked the part, your tongue outed you. One does not 'pass' in America, it seems, without English.”
Source: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
“It wasn't me, the boy thinks, who was inside my mother's womb, but this bullet, this seed I bloomed around.”
Source: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
“I think if Barthes again. A writer is someone who plays with the body of his mother, he says after the death of his own mother, in order to glorify it, to embellish it.”
Source: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
“The strays beyond the railroad are barking, which means something, a rabbit or possum, has just slipped out of its life and into the world.”
Source: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous