Cameron Maddux

“After I go out this door, I may only exist in the minds of all my acquaintances. I may be an orange peel.”
― J.D. Salinger

“There was a slight dampness to everything. The kitchen and the living room looked out at the water, and as I stood there I thought again how astonishing it was, just open water; there were rocks, and the dark water was swirling over them in waves with a whiteness as they hit the rocks, it was something. Farther out I could see two islands, one was small and the other was bigger, and they had a few evergreen trees on them, and you could see the rocks that surrounded them. There was a sweetness I felt at the sight of these two islands, and it reminded me of how when I was a child in our tiny house in the rural town of Amgash, Illinois, in the middle of fields of soybeans and corn there had been one tree in the field, and I had always thought of that tree as my friend. Now, as I looked at them, these two islands felt almost like that tree had once been to me then.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Lucy by the Sea

“She couldn’t catch her breath. She felt like the last girl in a horror film, running for her life, but the danger wasn’t behind her, trying to catch up, it was inside her, trying to break out.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Women

“out of terror comes pity and out of pity comes love and out of love the world can be redeemed again, and she can see that the world does not end, that it is vanity to think the world will end during your lifetime in some sudden event, that what ends is your life and only your life, that what is sung by the prophets is but the same song sung across time, the coming of the sword, the world devoured by fire, the sun gone down into the earth at noon and the world cast in darkness, the fury of some god incarnate in the mouth of the prophet raging at the wickedness that will be cast out of sight, and the prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore,”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song