“It had been so long since she had remembered all this, so long since she'd even thought of it, for there had been a great forgetting when she left home--a purposeful forgetting, because to forget her childhood meant she had survived it.” ― Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch

“Dogs. So easy, so loving. She had grown to have a very certain disdain for dogs and their willing, uncritical love. They should demand more, be moodier, have more conditions.”

― Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch

“This thing comes from us, she would explain in interviews. It rips its way out of us, literally tears us in two, in a was of great pain and blood and shit and piss. If she child does not enter into the world this way, then it is cut from us with a knife. The child is removed, and our organs are taken out as well, before being sewn back inside. It is perhaps the most violent experience a human can have aside from death itself. And this performance is meant to underscore the brutality and power and darkness of motherhood, for modern motherhood has been neutered and sanitized. We are at base animals, and to deny us either our animal nature or our dignity as humans is a crime against existence. Womanhood and motherhood are perhaps the most potent forces in human society, which of course men have been hasty to quash, for they are right to fear these forces.” ― Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch

"There is more to us than what we see. Each of us is bones and spirit, water and fire, Sunday holiness and Saturday hully-gully, Each of us is our past and our present and our future, collapsed into one being. And we are all made of the dust we call home. Even if this is the end and they bury our bones, that's fine. Because where the bones lay buried, the spirit can still dance. And when the spirit still dances, well, brother, the bones will rise again."

― Kayla Chenault, These Bones

"What's flesh and bone and ash—this matter we are—is just stuff. And at the end of all things, it'll be pulverized. So we mustn't pretend as if the differences between us are anthing but fleeting atoms, bound for decay. We think the world has lines of demarcation, between us and them, the while and broken, the dark and the light, the living and the dead. But those lines aren't really there. In reality, what is the difference between the sea and the wave?"

― Kayla Chenault, These Bones

“She laughed a lot, and easily. It wasn't until we actually became friends that I realized she was often very sad. America is like that, I must say, free and easy until you know better.” ― Te-Ping Chen, Land of Big Numbers

“I still can't help but wonder, do our lives truly hold no meaning? Even if you try desperately to find it, to contrive some kind of meaning, is it true that what's not there isn't there? Does life leave only misery behind? Could the fact that we're alive—the fact that we're in this life where joy and terror and peace and danger mingle—couldn't that itself be the meaning of life?”

― Kwon Yeo-Sun, Lemon

“Death carves a clear line between the dead and the living....The dead are over there and the rest of us are over here. When someone dies, no matter how great they were, it's like drawing a permanent line between that person and the rest of humanity. If birth means begging to join the side of the living, then death has the power to kick everyone out. That's why I think death, with its power to sever things forever, is far more objective, more dignified, than birth, which is the starting point of everything.” ― Kwon Yeo-Sun, Lemon

“I realise that having someone, someone to love and share your life with, is a nice thing to have. That physical companionship is, of course, nice. But the concept of romantic happily ever after has become increasingly alien to me, and I know it isn't necessary for survival.” ― Ore Agbaje-Williams, The Three of Us

"I pictured us content, rather than happy, because in reality, happiness is an unachievable concept designed to keep people unhappy and spending money on things they don’t need."

― Ore Agbaje-Williams, The Three of Us

“I understand more now about how it feels to love the excess in people, about how knowing someone else’s love will consume you doesn’t make it any less real or any less reciprocated, about how you can leave a person behind just to save the thing they value most—yourself. Or maybe I understood it even then but couldn’t have told you how.”

― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“I had abandoned the actual religion I was raised with as soon as I got to college, but when in moments of despair I needed the inspiration of a triumphant martyr figure who made me believe in impossible things, I thought not of saints or saviors but of my mother.” ― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“I used to think you were so brave, and sometimes I still do, and sometimes I think it’s just that there’s nothing in your life but you, and you have no idea what it means to be scared that what you do might matter.” ― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

"When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive–to breath, to think, to enjoy to love."

― Terry Pratchett, The Long Earth

"I wanted my grief, but instead I was left with a horrible nothingness, and I got really scared. But then I realized fear was a thing I could feel, and I clung to it. I was afraid of my loneliness. I was afraid I would never have anyone to love again. I blamed you for it. For leaving. Fear and anger. The anger helped me wake up in the monrings and eat and clean the house and wash myself. The anger even distracted me long enough that I would forget my loneliness, and sometimes, in short bursts, I even felt cheerful."

― Gerardo Sámano Córdova, Monstrilio

“I wanted him to snap, to finally and absolutely lose it. To break. He was withering. To wither is not the same as to break; to break is to have pieces to put back together, and to wither is to dry up, to wilt, to lose bone, to die, and death is the most boring.”

― Gerardo Sámano Córdova, Monstrilio

"Relief feels like happiness, if you don't know the difference."

― T. Kingfisher, Paladin's Grace