Toxin

“Life is bitter. Eat up.”
― Marjorie Liu, The Night Eaters, Vol. 2: Her Little Reapers

“I am not made for this, but Cora is. She skips lightly from stone to stone, vivacious and bright and so unencumbered. Jealousy is not an emotion I have easily tolerated in myself before, but it spills out now, raw and vicious, a blade turned against my own heart. I am jealous of Cora's passion and carelessness, but most of all I am jealous that she can experience all these things at an age when I held myself under such rigid control, when I was a creature made only from fear and survival. I am jealous that anybody has the gift of growing up differently.”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“I am not safe if I obey and reduce and control, just as I am not safe if I rebel and shout and anger.”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“How strange to feel something so close to mercy, whatever that was, and stranger still that it should be found in here of all places, at the end of a road of ruined houses by a toxic river. That among a pile of salvaged trash, he would come closest to all he ever wanted to be: a consciousness sitting under a lightbulb reading his days away, warm and alone, alone and yet, somehow, still somebody's son.”
― Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness