I'm not in shape to write much original content, partly out of my annual case of the bleaks, but also because I need to crank out multiple papers in the next couple of weeks. Perhaps a few choice quotations will do instead.
We are separated from death by the span of only four fingers, those of us at sea.
- Sheri Holman
Have I mentioned that I expect death around every turn, that every blue sky has a safe sailing out of it, that every bus runs me over, that every low mean syllable uttered in my direction seems to intimate the violence of murder, that every family seems like an opportunity for ruin and every marriage a ceremony into which calamity will fall and hearts will be broken and lives destroyed and people branded by the mortifications of love? Is it all right if I ask you all of this?
- Rick Moody
It was all lies, excuses, please believe me that I know full well how hollow this all must sound. But please believe me also when I say that once I have been told how the trick is done, I am not easily fooled the second time. I saw the possibilities, I did. But the fact was and the fact remains that I was tired, grotesquely tired, tired, and nothing more. Nothing more.
- Me (from an unpublished story, online in an earlier version)
If only I could lift myself up
like a cup or bowl and be emptied.
Poured out into the grasses, undrunk.
If only I could loosen myself from myself. The dead weight
of the body, of grief, forgotten.
Or loosed, blown by the wind.
- Hyejung Kook
She already knows what the conversation will be
This happens again and again.
- Nerissa Nields
Being able to articulate what the problem is won't make it go away.