Brad Young

“The people who lived in the portal were often compared to those legendary experiment rats who kept hitting a button over and over to get a pellet. But at least the rats were getting a pellet, or the hope of a pellet, or the memory of a pellet. When we hit the button, all we were getting was to be more of a rat.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“It was the sea that made me begin thinking secretly about love more than anything else; you know, a love worth dying for, or a love that consumes you. To a man locked up in a steel ship all the time, the sea is too much like a woman. Things like her lulls and storms, or her caprice, or the beauty of her breast reflecting the setting sun, are all obvious. More than that, you’re in a ship that mounts the sea and rides her and yet is constantly denied her. It’s the old saw about miles and miles of lovely water and you can’t quench your thirst. Nature surrounds a sailor with all these elements so like a woman and yet he is kept as far as a man can be from her warm, living body. That’s where the problem begins, right there—I’m sure of it.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea

“It was a mistake to believe that other people were not living as deeply as you were. Besides, you were not even living that deeply.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“if you are stuck somewhere small in your mind, somewhere unhappy or afraid or paralyzed or heartbroken, all of which are a kind of claustrophobic circling and circling, you might be able to reverse-engineer an expansion, shove yourself through into some larger mind place by putting yourself in the way of some vaster spaces in the world.”
― Jordan Kisner, Thin Places: Essays Between Knowing and Nothing