Kassi

“Vicky hated complicated births because the families never understood. They got angry, they blamed the doctors for the woman bleeding out, for the breached baby, or, in the best cases, for the emergency C-section. They didn't understand the simple explanation that these things happened, that it was nature, that women had died of childbirth for centuries. They couldn't understand that a birth wasn't some sacred experience, all that hocus pocus. These doctors ruining their bliss. She detested relatives.”
― Mariana Enríquez, Nuestra parte de noche

“Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.

Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.”
― Oscar Wilde, Selected Poems of Oscar Wilde including the Ballad of Reading Gaol

“It's like we're all going up a flight of stairs together and at a certain point I say 'this is as far as I go'. And on that step, higher up, they're all happy and I watch them from below. Had he always been like that? It wasn't shyness or reserve or adolescence, as other people thought. He wasn't going to get over it. He could dance when he was alone, he could get emotional in his room with a book, but when the party started he disconnected, the others turned into a movie that he could watch but not participate in. So he acted like he was invisible, which wasn't hard when everyone was drunk. And he withdrew into his room, where he felt the purest kind of relief.”
― Mariana Enríquez, Nuestra parte de noche

“Truth cannot be changed. When all the flowers of the world are dead, there will still be a true thing that is a flower.”
― Clara Winter, Tintagel