Catie Carlson

“When you have lived as long as I have, the div replied, you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same color.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“They ought to find out how to vaccinate for love, like smallpox.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“I don’t believe in safety. I wish I did. I am not brave. I simply know what to be scared of; I know to be scared of everything. There is freedom in that fear. That freedom makes it easier to appear fearless—to say and do what I want. I have been broken, so I am prepared should that happen again. I have, at times, put myself in dangerous situations. I have thought, You have no idea what I can take.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“What is the strongest pretext for loving?...If it is necessary, our atomized consciousness invents love, imagines it or feigns it, but does not live without it, since in the midst of infinite dispersion, love, even if as a pretext , gives us the measure of our loss.”
― Carlos Fuentes, The Old Gringo