Perhaps our deepest love is already inscribed within us, so its object doesn't create a new word but instead allows us to read the one written.

Invader and invaded held on to their fistfuls of earth, but in the end, the earth outlived the hands that held it.

War is unnatural, it causes people to act unnaturally.

She was fluent in four languages and yet her fists against the rusted hood were the fullest articulation of her defeat.

A good mixtape didn't just gather together a bunch of love songs, but instead created an emotional narrative specific to your affection. The stories in most of my favorite collections are collected more like songs on a mixtape than, say, collected like spare change. By which I mean they are in conversation with each other and work to become larger than their parts.

Her father was the face of her morning and night, he was everything, so saturating Havaa’s world that she could no more describe him than she could the air.

Happiness came in moments of unpredictable loveliness.