Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng Quotes

“Many people think that death is the end. The ending of pain, of hate, of love. But these things are not so easy to erase. Any kind of wanting leaves a scar. The living are good at forgetting, the years smoothing out memories until all the days of their lives are nothing but rolling planes of sameness. But in Hell, it is always just yesterday that everything was lost. The dead do not forget.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“But not everyone has dreams. Some people just are, the way that trees and rocks and rivers are just there without a reason, the rest of the world moving around them.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“Closing your eyes doesn’t stop monsters from devouring you.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“When you’re drowning and someone grabs your hand, you don’t ask them where they’re taking you.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater

“Cora thinks about the Girl with a Pearl Earring, and the Mona Lisa, and all the beautiful women immortalized in oil paint, and wonders if they said cruel things too, if their words had mattered at all or just the roundness of their eyes and softness of their cheeks, if beautiful people are allowed to break your heart and get away with it.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“Any kind of wanting leaves a scar.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“A secret part of Cora likes the end of the world because it makes her strangeness feel quieter.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“It’s strange how hate and love can so quietly exist at the same time. They are moon phases, one silently growing until one day all that’s left is darkness.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“Maybe she wants someone to teach her how to be a human the correct way, the way she never learned. Someone to wake her up and tell her what to eat, what to dream about, what to cry about, who to pray to. Because Cora somehow feels that every choice she’s made has been wrong, that every choice she will ever make will lead her deeper and deeper into a life that feels like a dark, airless box, and when she peers through the slats in the wood she’ll see the pale light of who she might have been, so bright that it blinds her.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“There are thousands of gods that open thousands of doors to anyone who knocks. It’s about deciding which doors you want to open.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“There's something peaceful about your worst fear coming true.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“But now, Cora knows she’s not dying. Dying doesn’t hurt this much. Dying means there’s an endpoint to the pain.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“Cora Zeng does not get angry because anger always melts through her fingers until it is a pool of anguish under her feet. There is not enough oxygen inside Cora to keep anger burning. No matter how hard she tries, she can only wield her sharpest thoughts against her own f lesh. She knows, on some level, that most of the problems in her life are her own fault in one way or another. Anger is just one of those thoughts that can never quite sink its teeth into her—she is not solid enough, and its jaws close around nothing at all.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“Cora knows that the face of fear is not an abstract what-if. Fear is born in the after, when the world peels back its skin and shows you its raw, pulsing innards, when it forces you to remember its name.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“But maybe she wants this monster to have teeth, wants it to be some intangible, hungry darkness that can swallow all her rage like a black hole. She doesn’t want him to have a name, a job, a wife that he holds with the same hands he uses to gut Asian girls like fish. The thought sickens her, the idea that the kind of person who carves people like her open could smile at other people. That he could be loved by other people. Because what does that make Delilah and Yuxi and Zihan and Ai and Officer Wang? Subhuman, bat eaters, garbage to be taken out, people who don’t deserve his humanness. Cora wants him to be a formless ephemeral ball of pure evil, but she knows that he’s not. And she doesn’t care about his redeeming traits but she knows that other people will, that the newspapers will highlight his accomplishments, that the courts will talk about him being a good father or diligent worker or a thousand other things he did that matter infinitely less than what he took from Cora.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“This sharp fire feels much better than God’s forgiveness ever could.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“It’s not about my gods or your Auntie Lois’s God being the right one. There are thousands of gods that open thousands of doors to anyone who knocks. It’s about deciding which doors you want to open.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“There’s no such thing as a hungry ghost, not in Cora’s life, because someone that deeply and irrevocably gone can never come back.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“There are thousands of monsters in the world—not just the ones in folktales, but the ones in real life who push girls in front of trains—and yet, there are still people who think Cora Zeng is the most fearsome of all. A sharp laugh forces its way out of Cora’s throat. Those people should see what fear truly is. Let them taste their sister’s blood, watch her headless body twitch, hear her windpipe still wheezing for breaths that won’t come, gurgling as the blood drowns down the wrong pipe. Let them remember it every time they close their eyes, whenever they hear the sound of a train, whenever salt stings their lips. Remind them that the same thing could happen to them any day, and then let them talk about what fear really means.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“Many people think that death is the end. The ending of pain, of hate, of love. But these things are not so easy to erase.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“Cora thinks about a time, before the pandemic, when she truly thought the worst monsters were the ones inside her own head. When she thought people were mostly good, that they would save each other.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“there are worse things than leaning a little bit into the crazy parts of you. Isn’t that what artists do, after all?”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“All are welcome in God’s house, Auntie Lois says, but she always emphasizes the all, as if God is especially generous for letting someone like Cora in, like there’s something about her that’s inherently unholy.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater

“No one would ever make a game where you only have one chance. But that’s all any of us get. And the worst part is I know I’m losing.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“But in real life, bodies are delicate.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“she isn’t above taking hush money, not in this economy.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“Cora wonders at what point a person stops being one singular person and becomes a collection of parts.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“Sometimes, when it’s really bright outside, it feels like I’m still in one of my games, like I have unlimited lives, everything is scripted, and I’m just pushing buttons and it’s okay if I fuck up—I can go back to my last save. Except I know that’s not true. I only have one life, and that’s fucking terrifying.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“Delilah never seemed the vengeful type. She drifted around life like she was riding a pool float, bumping into obstacles that gently nudged her to a new path but never overturned her into the water.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“If you want someone dead, you should have to sink your fingers into their eyes, feel their trachea collapse under your hands, let them scratch your arms and pull your hair and cry and beg. Because if you kill someone, you should want it more than anything you’ve ever wanted before. It shouldn’t be easy.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng