Janine Cousins

“I didn’t want to be in the world, around all those people who didn’t read books, who didn’t think they were important.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“To stand together under a sky - that no matter how grey and uncertain - still holds room for butterflies, moths, dragonflies and things we once were too fearful to name; things like whispered hope.”
― Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Thin Places

“What a relief, I thought, to free oneself from the heterosexual prison. Straightness : the predictable container in which all possible outcomes seemed already etched into stone—happiness, unhappiness, complacency, strife—a life in which we were all operating inside of a story already told, even as we sought to live an authentic existence.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

“I loved that the complexities of my emotions were understood by authors writing hundreds of years ago, I loved looking at their texts and trying to understand what they were aiming to do, to pull my own meaning from them, to point out what others didn’t see or notice—the repetition of blue imagery, the recapitulation of motifs of separation. I was good at that.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir