Katharine Duckett

“The most beautiful part of your body
is where it’s headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world.”
― Ocean Vuong

“Tem loved the mortuaries, though no one he knew was dead. Still he would beg to go, to grasp the hand of any adult willing to wind down those plush-carpeted stairways, past the sleek vaults, inviting and bright.”
― Katharine E.K. Duckett, Interzone 252, May-June 2014

“It was Julio who had coined the term “morphalating” to describe how people looked in the Afterlife.
“Flickering’s not quite the word for it,” Teskia had said as she’d watched Julio’s face shift, the wrinkles from his frequent grin creasing and fading, his facial hair receding from full beard into peach fuzz. “It’s more like–”
“Undulating–”
“Morphing–”
“Morphalating.”
The term had stuck–Julio liked the sci-fi feel of it, and Teskia was a sucker for goofy portmanteaus. As far as they knew, no one had bothered to name the phenomenon before: people were, for the most part, oddly incurious about the weirdnesses of the Afterlife.”
― Katharine E.K. Duckett, The Book of Apex: Volume 4

“The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King