Danya Kukafka > Quotes

“You don't need to have it all. You only need to figure out how much is enough.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“Grief was a hole. A portal to nothing. Grief was a walk so long Hazel forgot her own legs. It was a shock of blinding sun. A burst of remembering: sandals on pavement, a sleepy back seat, nails painted on the bathroom floor. Greif was a loneliness that felt like a planet.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“She had known from a young age that everyone had darkness inside-some just controlled it better than others. Very few people believed that they were bad, and this was the scariest part. Human nature could be so hideous, but it persisted in this ugliness by insisting it was good.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“No one is all bad. No one is all good. We live as equals in the murky gray between.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“...and she thought how sad it was that a single bad thing could turn you into a story, a matter to be whispered about. Tragedy was undiscerning and totally unfair.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“I wonder about choices. How we resent them, and how we regret them—even as we watch them grow.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“A thousand miles away, justice is being served—but justice, Saffy thinks, is supposed to feel like more. Justice is supposed to be an anchor, an answer. She wonders how a concept like justice made it into the human psyche, how she ever believed that something so abstract could be labeled, meted out. Justice does not feel like compensation. It does not even feel like satisfaction.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“Human nature could be so hideous, but it persisted in this ugliness by insisting it was good.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“There is good and there is evil, and the contradiction lives in everyone. The good is simply the stuff worth remembering. The good is the point of it all.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“Pity is destruction wearing a mask of sympathy.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“Give yourself a moment every day, Harmony had suggested once in group therapy. A single moment in which you are absolved of all responsibility. How much responsibility could a person hold, Lavender wondered. How much, before the overflow?”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“Nostalgia is my favorite emotion. It's like, you think you know how to deal with the passage of time, but nostalgia will prove you wrong. You'll press your face into an old sweatshirt, or you'll look at a familiar shade of paint on a front door, and you'll be reminded of all the time that got away from you. If you could live it all again, you'd take a long moment to look around, to examine knees against knees. Nostalgia puts you in this dangerous re-creation of something you can never have again. It's ruthless, and for the most part, inaccurate.”
― Danya Kukafka, Girl in Snow

“Sometimes you are certain this is all you are made of: a fleeting instant between action and inaction. Doing something, or not. Where is the difference, you wonder? Where is the choice. Where is the line, between stillness and motion?”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“In most of your memories, your mother is gone. And before she is gone, always, she is leaving.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“But Saffy knew about catastrophe. It was arbitrary. A thing descended from nowhere, pointed a bony finger, and smirked. As if to say: I choose you.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“Felix Culpa, her mother had written. The happy fault. The horrible thing that leads to the good.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“Saffy wondered about her own internal compass, the needle that kept her on this path, stopped her from wandering or regressing or giving up entirely. It scared her to realize there was no compass. There were only days and the choices she made within them”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“We are all bad, and we are all good, and no one should be condemned to one or the other. But if good can be tainted with the bad that comes after, then where do you place it? How do you count it? How much is it really worth?”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“Tragedy had a texture. A knot, begging to be unraveled.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“It's almost funny: you think you matter to someone. They're the center of your universe, the sun you revolve around. You'd give anything for their details. You inch closer, closer, with tentative steps. You can walk as far as you want, but it won't matter. You are not even on their map.”
― Danya Kukafka (author)

“She glimpsed that same craving in Jenny Fisk—an ask, for suffering. It was the scariest thing about being a woman. It was hardwired, ageless, the part that knew you could have the good without the hurt, but it wouldn’t be nearly as exquisite.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“It was irresistible: the almost.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“I have this idea. This theory, I guess. There is no such thing as good or evil. Instead, we have memory and choice, and we all live at various points on the spectrum between. We are created by what has happened to us, combined with who we choose to be.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“Forgiveness is flimsy. Forgiveness is like a square of warm sun on the carpet. You’d like to curl up in it, feel it’s temporary comfort, but forgiveness will not change you. Forgiveness will not bring you back.”
― Danya Kukafka

“This was how it always went, wasn't it? All those women who'd come before her, in caves and tents and covered wagons. It was a wonder how she'd never given much thought to the ancient, timeless fact. Motherhood was, by nature, a thing you did alone.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“Sister love was like food, or air, or memory itself. It was molecular. The very stuff of her.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“It seemed, then, that mothering did not have to be so rigid. There was no arc to it, no frame through which it ended or began. Mothering could be as simple as this: a woman and her very own blood, breathing in tandem through the darkest heart of night. *”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“You are a fingerprint. When you open your eyes on the last day of your life, you see your own thumb. In the jaundiced prison light, the lines on the pad of your thumb look like a dried-out riverbed, like sand washed into twirling patterns by water, once there and now gone.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“Lavender knew, then, that the world was a forgiving place. That every horror she had lived or caused could be balanced with such gutting kindness. It would be a tragedy, she thought—inhumane—if we were defined only by the things we left behind.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“It is possible, looking at the ocean, to believe it never ends.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution