Catherine

“I knelt down to pick up the hatchling to . . . . what? Give it back to its mother? Here is your dying chick? Just before I made contact with it, she dive-bombed me. The mother actually dive-bombed me. I sat back on my hunkers in surprise and admiration. So slight, so drab, so courageous. She put me to shame. I stood up and backed off and she alighted in front of her young, setting herself and her pattering heart between us.
Babies die, I thought as I regarded her. That is the world we live in.
I did not make this world.
If I could, I thought, I would make a different world. I would make a different world for you and me, Sailor. And for this brave bird.
But I can't.”
― Claire Kilroy, Soldier Sailor

“I'm getting old. Exiled ever further from the Rome of childhood in the distant empty provinces of old age, from which there is no return. And Rome no longer answers my letters. Somewhere the past exists as a house or a street that you've left for a short while, for five minutes, and you've found yourself in a strange city. It's been written that the past is a foreign country. Nonsense. The past is my home country. The future is a foreign country, full of strange faces, I won't set foot there.

Let me go back home... my mother told me not to be late.”
― Georgi Gospodinov, Time Shelter

“Hated cling film. Hated it more than I hated kinetic sand. Defeated by something that lacked a third dimension. While I'd been off tinkering on the cerebral plane, the smart money has been mastering its dark art. If you don't keep up with technology, it bypasses you, Sailor, but if you don't keep up with its opposite, the manual realm, it bypasses you just as surely and suddenly, there you are, a creature overtaken by evolution, obsolete, baying at the shoreline.”
― Claire Kilroy, Soldier Sailor

“just being perceived, all the time being perceived, was itself exhausting.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!