Margarite Attkisson

“The gingko tree leans lazily against the facing wall or perhaps it supports it; Stephen cannot be sure. The dense ridges of its bark now appear like rippled sand with, here and there, pools left behind by the tide. The bark is pocked with white spots, holed and crinkled with age, seemingly dead but for the life sprouting in its leaves, so smooth, so green, so deep. How remarkable this tree is, how changeable, how mysterious its leaves and branches and trunk … how infinite. Stephen reaches for another pipe. The smoke rubs out his yesterdays and tomorrows. There is only now, this tree, this pipe. Another pipe, ah, another pipe.”
― Michael Tobert, Karna's Wheel

“When we see a rock wall blocking our way, God sees a barrier to guard us someday.”
― Carolyn Cutler Hughes, Through God's Eye

“It seemed as though he would never pull free, until he awoke one morning feeling kind of awkward, as though his hands had been lopped off by some Arabian sword during a routine druggie blackout, and in their place, pale and membranous hands that had been fit to his wrists by aliens that took him up while he slept and then brought him back down – all of it in an effort to help him move up to where he belonged in society.”
― Harvey Havel, The Odd and The Strange: A Collection of Very Short Fiction

“He doesn’t have a fear of intimacy; he has a gut-wrenching terror of it.”
― Guy Morris, Swarm