“Perhaps one of the strangest sensations I’ve encountered, poised on the brink of motherhood, is the fact that even though I am reading copiously about babies and parenthood, I don’t know anything more than I did before.”

“…when a piece of knitted or woven cloth…unravels, it separates into a single thread. Perhaps that’s an easier way to look at this process…not as a falling apart, but as a paring down, a reduction to a single, unbound thread, from which to weave again.”

Sejal A. Shah on neurodiversity: “They say creativity arises in part from brain chemistry. Living with manic depressive illness has shaped me, created the contours of my adult life. I don’t tell everyone, but I am telling more.”

“In a real way, the trauma wiped the slate clean for me mentally. And that’s when I started the process of teaching myself to take myself seriously. By extension, I could start to take other black women seriously.” –Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom

“I struggle with thoughts about how I would live my life if I knew I had only days. We all ask ourselves that question at some point. But seriously, pause for a minute, move past the cliché of that question, and think about it.”

“I didn’t know enough to know I should be afraid of survival, too. I didn’t know I should be more afraid of mouths that mark you for a lifetime than the jaws that swallow you whole.”

“When Mike died at 47 — cardiac arrest caused by an enlarged heart and a blocked artery — our large, vital running community got a collective stitch: that sharp pain beneath the ribs, the stab that constrains the breath…What stopped his heart broke ours.”

“Sight loss has meant insight gains. . . . I don’t know what society’s perfection looks like as I have never been able to properly see. I can tell you though what a beautiful person is like. A beautiful person is loving. A beautiful person is kind.”

“I no longer remembered the name of the girl my husband had an affair with. It was interesting to me that this name, a name I had previously hated, a name that circled my mind over and over like a rusty old record, had suddenly slipped out of my brain.”

“White mother, black father in a part of Pennsylvania where pickups wave Confederate flags under a bruised sky. All four of them — parents and kids — have V names. Such hope in those names, their own little club of safety and love.”

Michael Moreci on what science fiction can teach us about ourselves: ” . . . sci-fi possesses the unique ability to instruct and inform, to subtly—or, at times, not-so-subtly—act as a warning of what happens to worlds overrun with inequality, with war, and with hate.”

“But in cooking an egg, Le Guin shows us the beauty of difficult things: the things we do not to survive, not because we must, but because we’re challengingly, gloriously alive.”

“Is this how I slide the chair of your sturdy heart across a carpet of years and back beneath my table of regret?”

“These babushkas survived Stalin and the Nazis. . . . How can they be expected to fear something neither male nor foreign, that does not even have feral teeth, but whose only crime is that it breathes and disappears into the same air.”

“How can I trust the world to give my child a fair shot when mainstream publications . . . hit us with ‘trans-friendly’ fire?”