Beryl Yuen

“I’d never met a man I would rather spend time with. I loved him for all sorts of reasons: He cooked without recipes; he wrote nonsense poems for his nieces; his large, warm family had accepted me as one of their own.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“Just a middle-age man with all the privilege that unasked for gift affords. When in truth it seems, we see suffering as the province of children, mothers, wives and lovers. Broken, struck by the hand of a man’s blind ambition, brutish strength. What of the gentle-man with the soft voice…”
― Peter B. Forster, More Than Love, A Husband's Tale

“I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations.”
― Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

“Do you know what a myth is, Jefferson?" I asked him. "A myth is an old lie that people believe in. White people believe that they're better than anyone else on earth--and that's a myth. The last thing they ever want is to see a black man stan, and think, and show that common humanity that is in us all. It would destroy their myth. They would no longer have justification of having made us slaves and keeping us in the condition we are in. As long as none of us stand, they're safe. They're safe with me. They're safe with Reverend Ambrose. I don't want them to feel safe with you anymore.”
― Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying