The Library at Hellebore Quotes

“It is the nature of people to overcomplicate things: we want there to be nuance to evil and dimensions to good.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Library at Hellebore

“We reside as well on a planet where the efficacy of medical science is questioned and media personalities argue whether a clot of cells has more value than a woman's life. To put it another way, these are unutterably stupid times.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Library at Hellebore

“I could think of a hundred things holier than being sacrificed to something that doesn't even love you back.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Library at Hellebore

“What’s death but going into another room?”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Library at Hellebore

“Sometimes we do terrible things to survive, don't we?”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Library at Hellebore

“When you have had your every freedom pared from you, you learn to hoard the manner and time and method of your death: it becomes the only thing that is really yours.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Library at Hellebore

“Far as I’m concerned, dirt’s the only holy thing in the world. It can make roses out of even the worst losers: in death, we achieve meaning.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Library at Hellebore

“I see you inside me," he said once, trailing us between classes. "I see you beneath my skin. I see you standing in the church of my lungs and you are there, holding my bones like a wedding bouquet.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Library at Hellebore

“Relationships were nooses and people deadweight: the romantics always ended up hanging from their hearts.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Library at Hellebore

“Trauma has a knack for macerating the past so all that remains are the sharp edges of the agony you sustained.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Library at Hellebore

“It’d been my stepfather’s voice too and the voice of so many men I’d met before, all of them charming until privilege crashed into reality, then out came this aggression, this meanness.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Library at Hellebore

“The library at Hellebore, however, was different. Appendage to the main campus, it acted only in the faculty's interest, which seemed to revolve exclusively around fucking us students over.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Library at Hellebore

“We sat there for an indeterminate period, time macerating, ablating cohesion, softening enough that past and present and future seemed to accordion together, and it felt both like the instant when it became clear we were becoming friends and like we were standing at the other’s funerals, eulogizing the dead like we were just girls, miraculous in our mundanity. The air rippled with heat.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Library at Hellebore