Chrystal McKay

“If you truly think wolves are the blood spillers, then you're blind...We do that. We are the people killers, the children killers. We're the monsters.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves

“I think they worried that my grandfather would infect me with some incurable dreaminess from which I’d never recover – that these fantasies were somehow inoculating me against more practical ambitions”
― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

“This thing comes from us, she would explain in interviews. It rips its way out of us, literally tears us in two, in a was of great pain and blood and shit and piss. If she child does not enter into the world this way, then it is cut from us with a knife. The child is removed, and our organs are taken out as well, before being sewn back inside. It is perhaps the most violent experience a human can have aside from death itself. And this performance is meant to underscore the brutality and power and darkness of motherhood, for modern motherhood has been neutered and sanitized. We are at base animals, and to deny us either our animal nature or our dignity as humans is a crime against existence. Womanhood and motherhood are perhaps the most potent forces in human society, which of course men have been hasty to quash, for they are right to fear these forces.”
― Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch

“The leopard in the zoo wanders to the edge of his pen and, through the bars or across an unjumpable moat, he stares at you with contempt for your inferiority, for needing that barrier between you. There is a shared understanding in that moment, nonverbal but no less real: the leopard is predator and you are prey, and it is only the barrier that permits us humans to feel superior and secure. That feeling, standing at the leopard’s cage, is edged with shame, at the animal’s superior strength, at his hauteur, his low estimation of you.”
― William Landay, Defending Jacob