moon

“I think of Barthes again. A writer is someone who plays with the body of his mother, he says after the death of his own mother, in order to glorify it, to embellish it.

...I change, embellish, and preserve you all at once.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“You're not a monster,' I said.
But I lied.
What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.
I read that parents suffering from PTSD are more likely to hit their children. Perhaps there is a monstrous origin to it, after all. Perhaps to lay hands on your child is to prepare him for war. To say processing a heartbeat is never as simple as the heart's task of saying yes yes yes to the body.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Sometimes I want to take on the whole world and then there are other times … when all I want is for the world to take care of me.”
― Ronan Hession, Panenka

“Look at them. They’re pretending, they behave as though they still have some control over their lives and make momentous decisions about which vegetable to cook first.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men