Emily McElroy

“Making a dessert is nothing less than crafting a smile.”
― B. Dylan Hollis, Baking Across America: A Vintage Recipe Road Trip

“I love you all, and have done no harm to anyone; and what have you done to me?”—said her charming, pathetic, dead face.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“One of the hallmarks of lamentation is its excess. Talking becomes screaming, singing becomes wailing. Mourners act out their pain on their own bodies, tearing their clothes and hair, beating their chests, even inflicting injuries. This intensity sets it apart from other forms of public witnessing. Lamentation is communication as it reels toward the unsayable, the inexpressible pain of loss. I see in practices of exhumation, in the lengths gone to recover the dead after annihilating violence, something of this excess. The enormous forensic undertakings are scientific and legal efforts, but they are also expressions of pain and acts of faith. As a postcard pinned to an office door at the FAFG forensic laboratory says: “Archeology is my religion.”
― Alexa Hagerty

“And they, too, passed on, so that Nesvítski did not learn who had been struck on the teeth, or what the ham had to do with it.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace