Recently added

“One is not born but rather becomes a woman,” goes Simone de Beauvoir’s famous dictum. I obviously was not born but became black when I went to England. Similarly, of course, I was not born but became a woman of color when I went to America.

Even during the days and nights when she was dazed and only half awake the stories must have insinuated themselves into her torn and bruised body like draughts and ointments with healing powers beyond all explanation. (There is no pain and no badness,) she still hears the dry voice of old Taras in her ear, that a story cannot cure.

[t]hrough perceiving the world as a story to be told and endlessly reshaped, I would argue, the reader is actually encouraged to act upon the world (..) literature becomes more, not less, potent

I know no good comes from comparing what I have to what they have, but seeing all that money and privilege, and having none, hurts. I try to convince myself that being a scholarship kid doesn’t matter, that I shouldn’t care.

We all automatically assume that those who write and who put their knowledge down in texts have something more valuable to offer than those who simply live their knowledge and use it to inform their lives.

Attempt new strategies which will convert previous defeats into victory.

I smiled and watched Charlie running away with the children , with his head down and his happy arms spinning like propellers, and I cried with joy when the children all began to play together in the sparkling foam of the waves that broke between worlds at the point. It was beautiful […] and that is a word I do not need to explain to you, because now we are all speaking the same language

This is my life now. I’m grateful that I have arrived at this point. This is where I had always wanted to be; writing full-time is much more challenging than I had imagined, but I’m truly enjoying the experience and learning from it each day.

For me, writing is a journey, and the start of that journey is a well-worn ritual that I must observe for several days before I can even begin.

The boy’s father had dark skin, darker even than my own, and the boy’s mother was a white woman. They were holding hands and smiling at their boy, whose skin was light brown. It was the color of the man and the woman joined in happiness. It was such a good color that tears came into my eyes.

I’ve spent two years denying what happened on that beach. Ignoring it, letting it fester. That’s what Andrew did too, and it killed him in the end. I’m not going to let it kill me and Charlie

I stowed away in a great steel boat, but the horror stowed away inside me. When I left my homeland I thought I had escaped—but out on the open sea, I started to have nightmares. I was naïve to suppose I had left my country with nothing.