Jason Hillenburg

“Our great novelists, though experts on indignity and assault, on loneliness and terror, tend to avoid treating the passionate encounter of a man and a woman, which we expect at the center of a novel. Indeed, they rather shy away from permitting in their fictions the presence of any full-fledged, mature women, giving us instead monsters of virtue or bitchery, symbols of the rejection or fear of sexuality.”
― Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel

“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“So the great affair is over but whoever would have guessed
it would leave us all so vacant and so deeply unimpressed
It's like our visit to the moon or to that other star
I guess you go for nothing if you really want to go that far.

It's like our visit to the moon or to that other star
I guess you go for nothing if you really want to go that far.”
― Leonard Cohen, Death of a Lady's Man

“I fought the truth of my continued state of sobriety daily. Deep inside, a black storm thrashed, lashing the underside of my heart, making me bleed steadily. I still felt like I couldn’t walk by a certain kind of bar without the energy of that bar grasping its wormy phantom skeleton fingers after me, catching my long hair or pricking my cheek and leaving scratches. I couldn’t pass by without the smell of it pressing on my chest, suffocating me even as it drew me in. That’s what being sober felt like. Something like not enough oxygen.”
― Lauren Sapala, West Is San Francisco