The Spine Quotes

“An instrument does not play itself.”
― Matri, The Spine

“In those seasons the No is not self-care. It is guardianship — the fierce clean No of the one who stands between the grazing world and the thing that cannot yet stand for itself — and it is the single most loving syllable in the language.”
― Matri, The Spine

“Whoever taught you that boundaries are unkind was, look closely, usually standing on the profitable side of your missing fence.”
― Matri, The Spine

“The love of a person with no boundaries is weather — it falls on you because it falls on everything.”
― Matri, The Spine

“Everyone who comes takes a little — a favour here, an hour there, your attention, your patience, the benefit of the doubt, one more small yes — each request reasonable, each taker likeable, and the sum of it, by evening, by year's end: knee height. Nothing left standing tall enough to flower.
People who feel this usually diagnose themselves with weakness, or exhaustion, or — the modern favourite — insufficient self-care, as though the answer were a scented bath. The gardener's diagnosis is simpler and has no shame in it at all: no fence. Not a character flaw. An infrastructure problem.”
― Matri, The Spine

“You do not clean the glass to create light. You clean the glass to stop blocking a light that was never yours to create.”
― Matri, The Spine

“Contentment is not the end of wanting. It is the end of being run by wanting.”
― Matri, The Spine

“Name the string, and it stops ringing.”
― Matri, The Spine