Bonnye Reed

“You get to the point where you're just empty. Empty of feelings and thoughts. Of bone and flesh and blood. Empty of hope and despair. You aren't dead. But you aren't living, either.”
― Barbara Nickless, Dead Stop

“The videos that show the coffins coming back. People don’t want to know. And you and I? We’re part of what society can’t bear to remember. Because if they really think about it, if they really look at us and realize the cost we’ve paid to keep them safe? They can’t live with the guilt. They put up their ribbons and they give us fucking discounts at stores and they say, ‘Thank you for your service’ so they can go home and feel good about themselves. But if they really looked at what war does to us? Hell. They’d never let us come home.” “Stop”
― Barbara Nickless, Blood on the Tracks

“Above the reach, low clouds sleepwalk across the February sky. Today they are fibrous, striated, like flesh being slowly torn from bone. It's four in the afternoon and already night has started chewing away the edges of the day. This is winter's waking death: half-light, refracted by gray water and dirty snow, begging the voracious dark to end its miser”
― W.S. Winslow, The Northern Reach

“If people had true knowledge of the world perhaps they would not take up arms and so perhaps he could be an aggregator of information from distant places and then the world would be a more peaceful place. He had been perfectly serious. That illusion had lasted from age forty-nine to age sixty-five. And then he had come to think that what people needed, at bottom, was not only information but tales of the remote, the mysterious, dressed up as hard information. And he, like a runner, immobile in his smeared printing apron bringing it to them. Then the listeners would for a small space of time drift away into a healing place like curative waters.”
― Paulette Jiles, News of the World