Yr Dead Quotes

“God, someone please notice me. Only, dear god, please not too closely.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“God, please notice me. Only, dear god, please not too closely.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“Anywhere can be a home, so long as it feeds you.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“What I fear as well, I guess, is other people—awkward conversation, being seen and witnessed, being discussed, the standard metrics and methods of various social deaths. And what I truly fear most, if anyone were to ask, which my father never does, is not just that I’ve wasted this one precious life, but that I’ll have to bear witness to other people appraising it, those who might have done so much more with this little platform of a body I’ve been gifted only to throw away, again and again, into the Hudson.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“Historically, love is considered a sign of lunacy. Scientists say it lights up the same section of the brain that responds to addiction, opioids, and the moon.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“Most people don’t remember their early infancy, which is a blessing. The first few months are an agony. Imagine feeling your soft wet skull still in pieces, the brain pressed directly against the skin, imagine feeling your skull bones slowly fusing into one complete object. Imagine the world inverted, a doctor in a white coat walks upon the ceiling. Imagine how there’s no language, just a collage of fractured sound, a shouting color with neither order nor meaning, no sense to temperature, food running through you like water through a busted faucet.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“What I know for sure is any word repeated enough ends up meaning nothing.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“I can’t even bring myself to do the chanting. Whenever I do, all I hear is my own voice, alone next to everyone else’s. Here I am singing along to the radio while the rest of the world is somehow inside the radio singing together.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“But what else is life? Besides blood, what ties us? Sometimes miracle is just another word for naming precisely what already exists.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“What’s the cost of living—although never, Why does it cost to live?”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“All I want to do is leave a little more room for what good people are left to do their feral blooming.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“I tried to make my life what I hoped death might look like, a weighted blanket, the arms of a comforter wrapping around you as you watch your own story unfold across a screen outside of you. But, of course, I realize now, death is quite the opposite. It is reliving all of it, the fog become sentient, whatever’s left, feeling every inch of the needle work its way in, then out again, and then back in. The mark you leave on the world, left forever in you.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“Invisibility can be another kind of violence. There are a hundred different apocalypses on the horizon, and what can I do? Everyone’s either talking about it and not acting, or worse, not even talking, just going back to their salads and yoga classes and pashminas. And what can be done, really?”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“We light the fire and watch it spread at first like a yawn and then like an infection and finally, a religion.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“We are learning to control fire, to take a burning thing inside us, and then let it go.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“though when the old men find us, they scold me with one outstretched finger, the same one I use to reinvent the world.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“I love anything that breaks suffering down into a clean taxonomy you might look to when lost and nod your head in the performance of understanding.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“All I want to be is a minor augury, the oracle at Delphi huffing fumes off the bituminous limestone. All I want to do is leave a little more room for what food people are left to do their feral blooming.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“[The lord, with their seven heads,] deemed, in their infinite wisdom and cruelty, that we must be punished for our gluttony, this invented sin, and a flipped a great switch that requires us to take the world inside us in order to survive it, and so it was, and so it has ever since been.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“I'm a writer, the writer replied, I can't speak back to you what was as if it is, but rather can only record it for you once it is gone, to offer an isness that isn't anymore, do you understand?”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead

“Maybe what it means to belong to a city is that, if it could flee – the city, I mean – you might be one of the things it would grab in the night to carry with it so it could remember its name.”
― Sam Sax, Yr Dead