Amy

“With my aversion to this cat, however, its partiality for myself seemed to increase.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Black Cat

“Was it not the case, said Aris – the boy who the previous day had mentioned the putrefying dog – that we use animals as pure reflections of human consciousness, while at the same time their existence exerts a sort of moral force by which human beings feel objectified and therefore safely contained? Like slaves, he said, or servants, in whose absence their masters would feel vulnerable. They watch us living; they prove that we are real; through them, we access the story of ourselves. In our interactions with them we – not they – are shown to be what we are. Surely – for human beings – the most important thing about an animal, he said, is that it can’t speak. His own story concerned a hamster he had when he was small. He used to watch it run in its cage. It had a wheel it ran around. It was always running – the wheel whirred and whirred. Yet it never went anywhere. He loved his hamster. He understood that if he loved it he had to set it free. The hamster ran away, and he never saw it again.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“The white man’s god is just like the white man. He thinks he is the only god, just like the white man thinks he is the only man. But the only reason he is god instead of Nyame or Chukwu or whoever is because we let him be. We do not fight him. We do not even question him. The white man told us he was the way, and we said yes, but when has the white man ever told us something was good for us and that thing was really good?”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems beside the point. The point itself seems increasingly obscure.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album: Essays