Broderick Napier

“I like flat black. It doesn't try to explain anything, and it's been hip since before I was born, I guess.”
― Dennis Cooper, Closer

“Pregnancy had seemed a reasonable excuse for letting her metal-smithing tools languish, but that accounted for only eighteen months of the last twenty-six years. Motherhood wasn't the real problem, though it took him a long time to figure out what was. She needed resistance, the very quality that metal most demonstrably offered up. Suddenly Glynis had no difficulty to overcome, no hard artisan's life with galleries filching half the too-small price of a mokume brooch that had taken three weeks to forge. No, her husband made a good living, and if she slept late and dawdled the afternoon away reading Lustre, American Craft Magazine and Lapidary Journal, the phone bill would still get paid. For that matter, she needed need itself. She could overcome her anguish about embarking on an object that, once completed, might not meet her exacting standards only if she had no choice. In this sense, his helping had hurt her. By providing the financial cushion that should have facilitated making all the metal whathaveyou she liked, he had ruined her life. Wrapped in a slackening bow, ease was a poisonous present.”
― Lionel Shriver, So Much for That

“Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't.
Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark -- why not kill myself? Missed the bus -- better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie -- maybe I shouldn't kill myself.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“Just as it did when I spoke to you that day from the phone, your face comes into focus more and more as I hold you here beside me.”
― Craig Clevenger, Dermaphoria