Maru

“All my life,” she said, “I have been told ‘go’ and ‘come.’ I am told how I will live, and I am told how I must die. I must be a man’s servant and a mare for his pleasure, or I must hide myself behind walls and surrender my flesh to a cold, silent god. I would walk into the jaws of hell itself, if it were a path of my own choosing. I would rather die tomorrow in the forest than live a hundred years of the life appointed me. Please. Please let me help you.”
― Katherine Arden, The Bear and the Nightingale

“But elegance attracted me. I liked the way it hid pain. One”
― Zadie Smith, Swing Time

“I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds.”
― John Keats

“My brother once showed me a piece of quartz that contained, he said, some trapped water older than all the seas in our world. He held it up to my ear. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘life and no escape.”
― Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry