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

“If you unpack the relationship between people and hedgehogs over the years, it’s not always been an easy one. From the earliest written texts that feature hedgehogs, it seems they’ve been misunderstood. Pliny, writing only a few decades after the birth of Christ, talked with great confidence about hedgehogs catching food by impaling it on their spines:

'They wallow and roll themselves upon apples and such fruit lying under foot, and so catch them up with their prickles, and one more besides they take in their mouth, & so carrie them into hollow trees.'

Medieval manuscripts continue the error – the 12th-century Aberdeen Bestiary describes

'The hedgehogs, covered in bristles, roll up in a ball, and carry grapes back to their young by impaling them on their spines.'

It seems no one had bothered to actually watch a hedgehog at work.”
― Sally Coulthard, The Hedgehog Handbook

“They’re afraid because we exist, she says. There’s nothing we did to provoke their fear, other than exist. There’s nothing we can do to earn their approval, except stop existing – so we can either die like they want, or laugh at their cowardice and go on with our lives.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky

“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