« You can’t have it all.
But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands gloved with green. […] You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August, you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love, though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot […]. You can speak a foreign language, sometimes, and it can mean something. […] You can’t count on grace to pick you out of a crowd but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump, […] until you learn about love, about sweet surrender, and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you, you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept. There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s, it will always whisper, you can’t have it all, but there is this. »
— Emily Levine, Bite Every Sorrow
