Efemia

“Today we are not put up on the platforms and sold at the courthouse square. But we are forced to sell our strength, our time, our souls during almost every hour that we live. We have been freed from one kind of slavery only to be delivered into another. Is this freedom?”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“Always he wanted to set her up to something, to give to her. And not only a sundae or some sweet to eat – but something real. That was all he wanted for himself – to give to her. Biff’s mouth hardened. He had done nothing wrong but in him he felt a strange guilt. Why? The dark guilt in all men, unreckoned and without a name.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“Paige had a sadness that was so desperate that it could not yet turn into anger.”
― Gabby Bess, Alone with Other People

“Look at this existence. This pathetic, fallible, wonderful body,” you can say rhetorically, sarcastically, or earnestly and still achieve death. Look at me falling in love with fallible bodies. Look at me performing emotional labor”
― Gabby Bess, Alone with Other People