Kelly Kipfer

“Sometimes the people you loved left you halfway through a story. Sometimes they left you without a goodbye. And, sometimes, they stayed around in little ways. In the memory of a musical. In the smell of their perfume. In the sound of the rain, and the itch for adventure, and the yearning for that liminal space between one airport terminal and the next. I hated her for leaving, and I loved her for staying as long as she could. And I would never wish this pain on anyone.”
― Ashley Poston, The Seven Year Slip

“To be nobody but
yourself in a world
which is doing its best day and night to make you like
everybody else means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.”
― E.E. Cummings

“She let the tears come. Anna wept in the way of an only and lonely child, because now, that was what she was. An acolyte of some new order. The fellowship of the damned. As above, so below. This was the ending of a cycle. All closing in. The sanctity was inchoate. Anna let the images of all she’d done and lost pass before her. She grieved her griefs. At long last, they came.”
― Clay Anderson, Though I Walk