Elizabeth Harrison

“Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing." —,”
― James Tate

“…when [my father] found out that he had cancer, he decided to bring me here and he gives me this big pink sea shell and he says to me, ‘Son, the answers are all inside of this.’ And I'm all like, ‘What?’ But then I realized that the shell was empty. There's no point to any of this. It's all just a random lottery of meaningless tragedy and a series of near escapes. So I take pleasure in the details, you know. A Quarter-Pounder with cheese. Those are good. The sky about ten minutes before it starts to rain. The moment where your laughter becomes a cackle. And I sit back, and I smoke my Camel straights. And I ride my own melt.”
― Helen Childress (Reality Bites)

“I thought I understood it, that I could grasp it but I didn’t. Not really. Only the smudginess of it, the pink slippered all contained semiprecious eagerness of it. I didn’t realise it sometimes would be more than whole, that the wholeness was a rather luxurious idea, because it’s the halves that halve you in half. I didn’t know; don’t know about the in-between bits of it. The gory bits of you and the gory bits of me.”
― Like Crazy

“There aren’t many ways to find comfort in this world. We must take it where we can get it, even in the darkest, most disgusting places. Nobody asks to be born. No one signs a form that says, You have my permission to make me exist. Babies are born, because parents feel that they themselves are not enough. So, parents, never condemn us for trying to fill our existential holes, when we are but the fruit of your own vain attempts to fill yours. It’s your fault we’re here to deal with the void in the first place.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays