❦.

“In this way, the Dream House was a haunted house. You were the sudden, inadvertent occupant of a place where bad things had happened. And then it occurs to you one day, standing in the living room, that you are this house's ghost: you are the one wandering from room to room with no purpose, gaping at the moving boxes that are never unpacked, never certain what you're supposed to do. After all, you don't need to die to leave a mark of psychic pain. If anyone is living in the Dream House now, he or she might be seeing the echo of you.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“And I think about all the things we could be
if we were never told our bodies were not built for them.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X

“Look to your records, cleric. Honor is a light that brings trouble. Shadows are safer by far.”
― Nghi Vo, The Empress of Salt and Fortune

“I read and savagely mourn, as if reading could somehow sate this hunger for grief, instead of what it does, which is fuel it.”
― Lauren Groff, Florida