Applelimeade > Applelimeade's Quotes

“Yes.” Reese nods. “I mean, they go through everything I go through as a trans woman. Divorce is a transition story. Of course, not all divorced women go through it. I’m talking about the ones who felt their divorce as a fall, or as a total reframing of their lives. The ones who have seen how the narratives given to them since girlhood have failed them, and who know there is nothing to replace it all. But who still have to move forward without investing in new illusions or turning bitter—all with no plan to guide them. That’s as close to a trans woman as you can get. Divorced women are the only people who know anything like what I know. And, since I don’t really have trans elders, divorced women are the only ones I think have anything to teach me, or who I care to teach in return.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“The moms I knew when I was little didn't have to prove that it was okay to want a child. Sure, a lot of women I know wonder if they do want a child, but not why. It's assumed why. The question cis women get asked is: Why don't you want kids? And then they have to justify that. If I had been born cis, I would never even have had to answer these questions. I wouldn't have had to prove that I deserve my models of womanhood. But I'm not cis. I'm trans. And so until the day that I am a mother, I'm constantly going to have to prove that I deserve to be one. That it's not unnatural or twisted that I want a child's love. Why do I want to be a mother? After all those beautiful women I grew up with, the ones who chaperoned my classes on field trips, or made me lunch when I was at their house, or sewed costumes for all the little girls that I ice skated with — and you too, Katrina, for that matter — have to explain their feelings about motherhood, then, I'll explain mine. And do you know what I'll say? Ditto.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“I am just the biologist; I don’t require any of this to have a deeper meaning. I am aware that all of this speculation is incomplete, inexact, inaccurate, useless. If I don’t have real answers, it is because we still don’t know what questions to ask. Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“In the long scheme of things," she says, "we are but temporary inhabitants of this world, dirt and ash, recycled stardust."
"But in death, we become memory," Damien says. "In grief, we're made permanent.”
― Brendan Shay Basham

“All that land was just for the wheat, and the wheat was just for the flour. My bread had other ingredients, and all the other breads had still more, salts and yeasts and seeds and nuts and chemicals and additives harvested in laboratories and manufactured in factories. People worked in all those places, making all those ingredients and mixing them together to make bread, and someone made the label and the sack and the bag and the basket. Someone had loaded a truck, and driven it to town to be unloaded, and someone had arranged all the loaves in the supermarket, all to bring me this loaf of bread I would buy for a pittance, a word which here means “hardly any money.” This pittance, of course, would be split among the grocers and the farmers and the label makers and all of the people I had imagined, plus all of the people I hadn’t imagined and would never imagine. Surely it was not enough money for everybody. Surely someone was not getting enough money. I could imagine them living in poverty, maybe even starving, and yet there was so much bread, right here, they might eat. The whole story was bewildering, and perhaps even cruel, and yet I did not want it to end. I did not want the supermarket to close down and stop selling its abundance. I liked this bread.”
― Lemony Snicket, Poison for Breakfast

“He wants to say: hunger is all I am and all my life is. Hunger runs through my veins like blood, branches through me like a fungus, swelling and renewing itself daily. I am lost on a sea of hunger, blue and black and heaving and full five fathoms deep below and rarely, rarely do I feel anything besides /hungry/, rarely, rarely does a jolt of feeling or emotion pierce the hide of my hunger, and never, never have I been able to live the life God presumably gave me to live, to dance and think and remember and kiss, no, all my life I have stood at the threshold of my life waiting to be let in because of this hunger, no living for Tarare.”
― A.K. Blakemore, The Glutton

“I tell myself that it matters, and that the relics of my life will miss me. Sometimes I believe it.”
― Katherine Dunn, Geek Love