Mo

“Most people misunderstand the crime of sexual abuse. They think of stolen youth, a child tucked under the arm and spirited away. But it isn’t like someone entering your house and stealing something from you. Instead, someone leaves something with you that grows until it replaces you. They themselves were once replaced this way, and what they leave with you they have carried for years within them, like a fire guarded all this time as it burned them alive inside, right under the skin. The burning hidden to protect themselves from being revealed as burned. You imagine that the worst thing is that someone would know. The attention you need to heal you have been taught will end you. And it will—it will end the pain you have mistaken for yourself. The worst thing is not that someone would know. The worst thing is that you might lay waste to your whole life by hiding.”
― Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“When I am gripped with despair, when I think I might stop, I speak to my dead. Tell them a story. What am I doing with this life? They hold me accountable. I let them make me bolder or more modest or louder or more moving, but I ask them to listen, and then write.”
― Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“Monsters, monsters, big and small,
"They're gonna come and eat you all.
Corsai, Corsai, tooth and claw,
Shadow and bone will eat you raw.
Malchai, Malchai, sharp and sly,
Smile and bite and drink you dry.
Sunai, Sunai, eyes like coal,
Sing you a song and steal your soul.
Monsters, monsters, big and small,
They're gonna come and eat you all!”
― Victoria schwab, This Savage Song

“No mourners, no funerals. Another way of saying good luck. But it was something more. A dark wink to the fact that there would be no expensive burials for people like them, no marble markers to remember their names, no wreaths of myrtle and rose.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom