Larkin

“I play, though of course you couldn't really call what I'm doing playing, but it clashes with the scurrying of rats, their awful screeching, and in my mind, those rats aren't just rats, they're everything in the world that's broken. They're the things falling apart, and the part of you that wants them to. They're the Athenians burning Hyccara and the Syracusans chucking those Athenians into the quarry. They're the invisible disease that ate away at the insides of little Helios till he couldn't walk or, in the end, even speak, just cry with pain. Those rats are the worst of everything under an indifferent sky, but the sound coming from the aulos, frail as it might be in comparison, well, that's us, I say to myself, that's us giving it a go, it's us building shit, and singing songs, and cooking food, it's kisses, and stories told over a winter fire, it's decency, and all we'll ever have to give, I say to myself, as my lungs burn and my eyes water, 'cause I don't have much left, but I keep blowing away at the aulos, playing my song...”
― Ferdia Lennon

“Some men are happiest when they don't have to move an inch from their hearths. But for some of us, to sit still is to feel the weight of six feet of earth on our chests.”
― Deepa Anappara, The Last of Earth

“I’ve made my own hunger into a practice, made everyone who passes through my life subject to a close and inappropriate reading that occasionally finds its way, often insufficiently, into paint. And when I am alone with myself, this is what I am waiting for someone to do to me, with merciless, deliberate hands, to put me down onto the canvas so that when I’m gone, there will be a record, proof that I was here.”
― Raven Leilani, Luster

“Their cheeks are plump and pink and shining like they’ve been eating too much sugar, but actually it’s Gossip Glow, the flushed look that comes from throwing another woman under the bus.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny