Jennifer

“she thinks of double-shifts and boarding-house fleas and all the nothing-girls whose highest hope is for a husband like Floyd Matthews, soft-palmed and stupid, and how it would feel to want more. She thinks of her daddy's knuckles and Mr. Malton's leers and how it would feel to be the dangerous one, for a change.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Once and Future Witches

“I don't die from not waking up, and I don't die falling from the edge of the atmosphere either. I'm not written off as Acceptable Wastage. They have to work out very carefully the precise level of expense that's necessary, and the precise percentage of failed deliveries — meaning dead people — this entails. Because who wants to spend a single cent more than you have to when you're shipping convicts to die in a work camp? People who've gone against the system are now going to pay their dues permanently, for the rest of their lives. People like me. I hear the figures later: twenty per cent Acceptable Wastage. If that sounds like an absurd loss of investment, then you don’t know the history of people shipping other people against their will from place to place.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“But I've cared as much, I admit, about people I haven't met. I care about Judy Garland and Natalie Wood and the Black Dahlia. I care about the lacrosse player murdered by her ex at UVA, and the girl whose boyfriend was definitely not working at LensCrafters that day, and the high school student killed in her boyfriend's Shaker Heights home while everyone slept, and poor Martha Moxley, and the woman in the hotel elevator, and the only Black woman at the white-lady wine party, dead on the lawn, and the woman shot through the bathroom door by her famous boyfriend, who claimed he thought she was a burglar. I have opinions about their deaths, ones I'm not entitled to. I'm queasy, at the same time, about the way they've become public property, subject to the collective imagination. I'm queasy about the fact that the women whose deaths I dwell on are mostly beautiful and well-off. That most were young, as we prefer our sacrificial lambs. That I'm not alone in my fixations.”
― Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions for You

“This has been a long time coming, which is almost the same as being prepared.”
― Gwen E. Kirby, Shit Cassandra Saw