Keely

“Your mother leaned her head on my shoulder. I hardly breathed for having it there. I had certainly never felt so alive and cozy whilst nearly frozen to death.”
― Elizabeth Crook, The Madstone: A Novel

“I was demolishing a lettuce leaf, my oval raspy-toothed mouth opening and closing like a flesh valve as I oozed along on my own self-generated glistening slime highway. The lovely green blur all around me, the lacework I was creating, the scent of chlorophyll, the juiciness—it was pure bliss. Live in the moment, humans are often told, but snails don’t need to be told. We’re in the moment all the time, and the moment is in us.”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

“Some of what makes us human is our smallness. The brevity of our lifespans, the shortness of our memories, the narrowness of each person's field of vision. My Marian-ness is in the slender sample of the world that I am able to bring to my work. If we did not have this smallness, these limits, there would be no way to tell Ffarmer from Sappho, or Eliot, or anybody. So what was I to make of Charlotte--not small but all-devouring, ubiquitous, remembering? Anointed, in a way, by her magnitude. And at the same time, I am certain, diminished by it.”
― Sean Michaels, Do You Remember Being Born?

“In all the art Jay’s seen, sperm whales are barges of fat. But when the whale before him curls its fluked tail to the side, muscles larger than Jay pull tight, pinching seams through the blubber. It must be the strongest thing that ever lived, matched only by its unexpected grace. It holds the pose: a comma in a sentence so large only gods can read it.”
― Daniel Kraus, Whalefall