“Womanhood was a dangerous business if you didn’t get it right.”
The Mermaid of Black Conch, Monique Roffey
Category: Quotes
We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality. We create it to be able to stay.
Lynda Barry
I am writing this account, in another man’s book, by candlelight, inside the belly of a fish.
Edward Carey, The Swallowed Man
Memory is a map of sorts, but hand drawn, incomplete, and full of errors. It can let you know a place exists, but you cannot trust it to get you there.
Charlie Kaufman, Antkind
In some countries you kill a monster when it’s born.
Other places, you kill it only when it kills someone else.
Other places, you let it go, out into the forest or the sea, and it lives there forever, calling for others of its kind.
Maria Dahvana Headley, The Mere Wife
There will be another shore after the rapids, I promise.
Margaret Atwood, Words to Live By, Vogue January 2021
Glass as day-blooming flower,
Martha Sprackland, Domestic
television as mortar shell. Television as volleyball against white sun.
Sun as broken glass, in fragments,
glass as crazy paving on street below.
Power cord as vapour trail.
White smoke as cigarette smoke,
smoke as wedding dress pulled through water,
smoke as blood in water.
Glass as water on street below.
Pavement cracks as broken glass as x-ray
held to box of light. Television as broken wrist.
Power cord as skywriting, as Marry Me
on biplane banner. Television as biplane.
Television as bird. White flower growing
in pavement crack as open hand.
Glass as broken glass.
Sometimes naming a thing – giving it a name, or discovering its name – helps one to begin to understand it.
Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower
She had become the sort of person she approved of but she wasn’t sure she had chosen anything she actually wanted.
Sophie Ward, Love and Other Thought Experiments
“Go to Old Delhi, and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundred of pale hens and brightly coloured roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them. They know they are next, yet they cannot rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop.
The very same thing is done with humans in this country.”
Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger