People do not know what to make of me, and this pleases me. I don’t want to be scrutable.
The deep will be our sibling, our parent, our relief from endless solitude. Down here, we are wrapped up. Down here, we can pretend the dark is the black embrace of another.
Poor, poor books. Lonely pages bound in lonely leather, their only company the occasional louse. They exist only t be read, and yet with no one there to read them, they might as well not have been bornt at all. I run my fingers along the spines of the books I can reach. I do it to affirm them. To let them know I’m a lover of stories even stories about alchematics or biology and other true things.
The point is what you do when you don’t have the details. Do you interrogate? Do you examine? Or do you settle for the obvious answer?
She had no wish to transform trauma to performance, to parade what she’d come to think of as her own tragedies for entertainment.
Where history saddened others, we felt only a glorious, burning anger. We liked the challenge of it. It suited us. Anger was our favorite emotion. We were at home in it. It gave us purpose.
You Lived. You did what you needed to do to make sure you lived. Our survival honors ancestors more than any tradition.
Loving, worshipping, and bowing down to folks who harmed you was written into the genes of all animal creatures. To be alive meant to lust after connection, and better to have one with the enemy than with no one at all. A baby’s fingers and mouth grasp on instinct.
What does it mean to be born of the dead? What does it mean to begin?
You are mean because inside you’re tiny. So tiny you cannot hold up the weight of your own body. You must inflate your ego just to fill the skin. You float around like a helium balloon. Blown up and bloated and gassy and empty.
There’d be no forgiveness this time. It was one thing to destroy a person, but to destroy their work was a sacrilege Aster couldn’t easily forget. All that was left of a person’s life was recorded on paper, in annals, in almanacs, in the physical items they produced. To end that was to end their history, their present, their future.
Nothing is more sad than a person who believes in something that’s so clearly not true.
I like the woods,” she said. “In them, the possibilities seem endless. They are where wild things are, and I like to think the wild always wins. In the woods, it doesn’t matter that there is no patch of earth that has not known bone, known blood, known rot. It feeds from that. It grows the trees. The mushrooms. It turns sorrows into flowers.
In my language, there is no word for I. To even come close, you must say, E’tesh’lem vereme pri’lus, which means, This one here who is apart from all. It’s the way we say lonely and alone. It’s the way we say outsider. It’s the way we say weak. Everyone always wonders about I love you. In Ifrek you say, Mev o’tem, or, We are together. “How do you say, I’m tired?” people ask. “Ek’erb nal veesh ly. The time for rest is upon us.
Going against tended to end more rightly, more justly, than going with. People were wrong. Rules, most of the time, favored not what was right, but what was convenient or preferable to those in charge.
Truth was messy. The natural order of an entropic universe was to tend toward it.
Pain is energy. It lights us. This is the most basic premise of our life. Hunger makes us eat. Tiredness causes us to sleep. Pain makes us avenge.
The audiobook that you are currently listening to and are likely upset that you listened to too quickly. Were you at double speed? I know you were.
We must each be where we belong.” “What is belonging?” we ask. She says, “Where loneliness ends.
People were so often mean that when they weren’t, there was a tendency to bestow sainthood upon them. Aster did not reward common decency with her affection.