Joseph Cadena

“Freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Under the covers, we made friction of each other and fiction of everything else.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“What do you call the animal that, finding the hunter, offers itself to be eaten? A martyr? A weakling? No, a beast gaining the rare agency to stop. Yes, the period in the sentence—it’s what makes us human, Ma, I swear. It lets us stop in order to keep going.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs. They just need to want something and not care how they get it.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House