Opium and Absinthe

by Lydia Kang

It is better to be a coward than a corpse.

Despair has its own calms. —Jonathan Harker

No woman lives a life unscathed. It’s what makes us strong. We are broken and mended, remade every time. We must, or it destroys us.”

“Forgetting is an act of survival.

Remember, my friend, that knowledge is stronger than memory, and we should not trust the weaker.

“We’re all just walking around half-dead anyway.” “Ah, but it’s the half-alive part that makes it all fun,” Tillie said, beaming.

It was amazing how grief could be so greedy as to take away everything, even tears.

Sometimes, books are not adequate to keep my imagination going. A person needs to really live to feel alive sometimes.” “Yes, I suppose so.” “Otherwise, we’re all just in our little jail cells.”

We learn from failure, not from success,’”

Stories are how the world evolves.”