Abra > Abra's Quotes

“[...] his friends were all a bunch of poor cunts and his mother was a fool who still believed her man was coming back one day, a fucking fool who pretended she didn’t know that Brando’s dad had another family over in Palogacho and only sent them money each month because he felt guilty for having tossed them out like rubbish bags, as if we were pieces of shit, Mum, wake the fuck up: what’s the point in all that praying, what good does it do if you can’t even see straight, if you can’t see what everyone else does, you stupid, stupid woman! But she would just lock herself in her room and chant her litanies, almost shouting them to block out Brando’s raging and bashing against her door, the kicking and thumping that he would have happily aimed at her rotten mug, to see if that way she’d get it through her thick skull, to see if she’d just die and fuck off once and for all to her motherfucking promised land and stop banging on at him with her prayers and her sermons, her moaning and snivelling, all that: Lord, what have I done to deserve this child? Where’s my darling boy, my sweet, dear little Brando? How could you allow the devil to enter him, Lord? The devil doesn’t exist, he’d shout back, or your shitty God, and his mother would let out an anguished wail followed by more prayers, intoned with even greater intensity, even greater devotion, to make up for her son’s blasphemes, before Brando stormed off to the bathroom, where he’d stand before the mirror and stare at the reflection of his face until it looked like his black pupils, together with his equally black irises, had dilated so wide that they covered the entire surface of the mirror, a forbidding darkness cloaking everything: a darkness devoid of even the solace of the incandescent fires of hell; a desolate, dead darkness, a void from which nothing and no one could ever rescue him: not the wide-open mouths of the poofs who approached him in the clubs on the highway, not his nocturnal escapades in search of dog orgies, not even the memory of what he and Luismi had done, not even that [...]”
― Fernanda Melchor, Hurricane Season

“[...] fun for me was sneaking off to peer into a tidal pool, to grasp the intricacies of the creatures that lived there. Sustenance for me was tied to ecosystem and habitat, orgasm the sudden realization of the interconnectivity of living things. Observation had always meant more to me than interaction. He knew all of this, I think. But I never could express myself that well to him, although I did try, and he did listen. And yet, I was nothing but expression in other ways. My sole gift or talent, I believe now, was that places could impress themselves upon me, and I could become a part of them with ease. Even a bar was a type of ecosystem, if a crude one, and to someone entering, someone without my husband’s agenda, that person could have seen me sitting there and had no trouble imagining that I was happy in my little bubble of silence. Would have had no trouble believing I fit in [...]”
― Jeff VanderMeer

“We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting”
― Charles Bukowski

“I put flowers on Algernons grave about once a week. Mrs Flynn thinks Im crazy to put flowers on a mouses grave but I told her that Algernon was special.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algeron

“Shade for a man
And shelter for animals,
Planted in your name,
May you be the same for those around you,
Every year the same.”
― Nancy J. Cavanaugh, This Journal Belongs to Ratchet

“Something akin to pride kreeps into his voice, but it's a hollow sort of pride. It's the pride of someone who's rarely proud of anything. It's the type of pride that can be knocked over with a feather, and so it rarely gets to shine in the face of the world.
The little Black kid flashes those impossibly white teeth at me and he laughs and then he covers his smile and quells the laughter [...], and I know that he's spent his entire life being afraid to be happy.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“Certain bodies don't belong to their inhabitants. Never have, never will again. A persistent, inescapable, and horrific truth known by millions of unsettled bodies. The Fear.

It had always been there, but I could see it now. Could really recognize it. And once that happens, once you see it, you can't look away. Can't ever quiet it. Can't ever forget that you don't belong to yourself anymore, but to the hands, fists, cuffs, and bullets of a stranger.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“Only love can ever answer back.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“That we were frightened by your death-no... it is that your harsh death darkly interrupted us, divided what-had-been from what-would-be: that was our concern; coming to terms with it will accompany everything we do: Today; tomorrow. Again and again. You have gone on.... But you were frightened too.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“But the fact of the matter is that there isn't anything going through my mind right now. Nothing at all. My mind is just a blank, windswept expanse. One that I've spent almost my entire life crafting. And now it's here, and it's slowly killing me, and there doesn't seem to be anything that I can do to stop it.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“It's only a fall if you think about the ending. Otherwise, it's called flying.”
― Jason Mott, Hell of a Book

“You will lose someone you can’t live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.”
― Anne Lamott

“The base unit of life is all life.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“He hates that he can fold himself up so tightly in his own skin that there's nothing real about him on the outside.”
― Holly Black, The Prisoner’s Throne