Bilqees (thebellekeys)

“It hit me pretty hard, how there’s no kind of sad in this world that will stop it turning. People will keep on wanting what they want, and you’re on your own.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“This is the problem with knowledge: its inexhaustible craving. The madness inherent in knowing there is only more to know. It’s a problem of mortality, of seeing the invariable end from the immovable beginning, of determining that the more you try to fix it, the more beginnings there are to discover, the more ways to reach the same unavoidable end.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Complex

“Nobody needed to get all that educated for being a miner, so they let the schools go to rot. And they made sure no mills or factories got in the door. Coal only. To this day, you have to cross a lot of ground to find other work. Not an accident, Mr. Armstrong said, and for once we believed him, because down in the dark mess of our little skull closets some puzzle pieces were clicking together and our world made some terrible kind of sense. The dads at home drinking beer in their underwear, the moms at the grocery with their SNAP coupons. The army recruiters in shiny gold buttons come to harvest their jackpot of hopeless futures. Goddamn. The trouble with learning the backgrounds is that you end up wanting to deck somebody, possibly Bettina Cook and the horse she rode in on. (Not happening. Her dad being head of the football boosters and major donor.) Once upon a time we had our honest living that was God and country. Then the world turns and there’s no God anymore, no country, but it’s still in your blood that coal is God’s gift and you want to believe. Because otherwise it was one more scam in the fuck-train that’s railroaded over these mountains since George Washington rode in and set his crew to cutting down our trees. Everything that could be taken is gone. Mountains left with their heads blown off, rivers running black. My people are dead of trying, or headed that way, addicted as we are to keeping ourselves alive. There’s no more blood here to give, just war wounds. Madness. A world of pain, looking to be killed.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“The way she only inhabited the person she thought of as herself if she was feeling someone else’s pain. Their grief. Their anger. Their debilitating joy. Their delusory love. Their cruel and unrelenting fate. How beautifully she could carry the suffering of others, wearing their misery so she didn’t have to acknowledge her own...Translating the human experience which was itself full of badness, so that she never had to hold her own badness for too long.”
― Olivie Blake, Gifted & Talented