Margaret Bennett

“Beyond town lay the twin cables of the railway, and the plains, gray and snow-dregged in winter, yellow every other season, scattershot with distant, unseen forts. You could stand anywhere and look off in any direction and feel you were nowhere, and yet somehow perfectly bounded, perfectly surrounded. That was Cheyenne: nowhere, wanting nothing more than to be exactly what it was.”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“Grief is an eroding wind. After grief has blown through, there is just the bedrock of a person.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Quiet Until the Thaw

“Now I think about how much shutting off was required, just to exist in day-to-day experience. You couldn’t express shock at everyone dying right in front of your eyes, because shock felt like a form of cruelty. So you would act like everything might be okay, even when nothing was okay.”
― Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing up with the AIDS Crisis

“It's as if when we continuously pass up the opportunity to listen to those most affected by the shortcomings of our systems, and instead continue to reward those who benefit most from those systems, we end up making no progress at all.”
― Ijeoma Oluo, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America