Bex Brownsword

“I’ve tried in this telling, time and again, to pinpoint the moment where serything starts to fall apart. Everything, meaning me. But there's also the opposite, where some little nut cracks open inside you and a tree starts to grow. Even harder to nail. Because that thing's going to be growing a long time before you notice. Years maybe. Then one day you say, Huh, that little crack between my ears has turned into this whole damn tree of wonderful.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“And now Charles's world had become his world as well, and for the first time in their friendship there was a trench, and there was no way for her to come to him, and no way that he could return to her.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise

“And then she died on your birthday. Fuck a duck, bro. You win." I thought about my last birthday I'd had at Aunt June's. Mom didn't really enter into it. I told Angus my mom being dead wasn't something I pinned exactly on my birthday.' "It's more like this bag of gravel I'm hauling around every day of the year. If somebody else brings it up, honestly, I'm glad of it. Like just for that minute they can help me drag the gravel.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“What I wanted more than any. thing was to grow up. Hard to explain, given how I got short-sheeted on the childhood. Carefree, what is that? If I'd ever known at all, I couldn't remember. But I was still stuck outside of full adulthood, blowing smoke under its door, eyeing the windows with a cement block. It's all we want, we ragged boys of the world. To live as men.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead