martha

“Each giraffe had the long eyelashes of horses, and those same sad eyes, like they knew they weren’t made for this world. Or worse, like they knew they were.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“What filled his head was how bad he was at all this. He hated being flirted with but he fell in love all the time, and never with people who loved him back—generally the ones who would never have dreamed of flirting with him. He was like one of those cats that only wanted to be stroked by people who were allergic to cats.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Mars House

“With a partner you had the story of how you met, choosing each other out of everyone in the world, and the years together were chaptered with joint decisions - no one could ever say it was all a dream; both parties were accountable. Not so with a child. For the child it WAS a dream. And the unpunctuated days into years moved much more quickly (for the parent), so all one could do was free-fall through the chaos, madly making sandwiches and washing hair and hope that there would be some ritual, some time for reflection, at the end.”
― Miranda July, All Fours

“Do you ever feel like your whole life happened to you in languages you don't speak anymore?”
― Natasha Pulley, The Hymn to Dionysus