The Line I Wish I'd Written

If you’ve been a reader for any amount of time, you’ve surely been met with the arresting power of a carefully curated sentence. Some lines in literature don’t just resonate, they echo. They linger, pressing their weight against you, forcing you to be forever changed by the mere fact they exist… in that specific order, particular context, tone, all.

For me, in all the words I’ve consumed and produced in my life, that singular line of absolute wonder belongs to Toni Morrison. In her novel, The Bluest Eye, she writes:

“So when I think of autumn, I think of somebody with hands who does not want me to die.”

The sentence calls to a moment of wordless care, of love shown in action rather than declaration. It’s haunting and tender, a line that wraps you in its melancholy and simultaneously offers the smallest ember of hope. Those words contain an entire universe of love, despair, and the thread connecting a daughter to her mother that is fragile and indestructible at the same time.

I always felt big love from my mother, whom I lost to cancer a little over fifteen years ago. She was a constant. A steady presence that made me feel safe no matter where I was in the world, or who I was with. She taught me that love isn’t just love—it’s hope. And often it’s the quiet love that’s the most powerful. The kind of love that runs in the background. The kind that tiptoes into your room in the dead of night when you’re sick and struck with fever, rubs your chest and back with menthol so you can breathe easier, then slips out so gently you live the rest of your life not knowing whether it was real or not.

Morrison didn’t just write stories; she built cathedrals out of language. This line makes me pause every time because it perfectly encapsulates the power of words to distill the complexities of human experience into something heartbreakingly simple. It’s what I strive for as a writer—not just to tell a story but to write something that lingers long after the last page is turned.

I started reading at the age of two. I started writing stories six years after that. It’s my heart’s deepest hope that I never have to stop. I aim to live out the rest of my days searching for the magical combination of words that somebody somewhere will tuck into their heart forever, pulling it out whenever someone asks: What’s a line you wish you’d written?