Rogomelec

“He howls questions to me: Who are you? Why are you doing this? I didn’t do anything to anyone. I don’t deserve this. Why me? This is a failing of men. This same violence, applied to a woman, she does not ask why it is being inflicted upon her, she only struggles unsuccessfully to free herself and grieves the fact she has grieved her entire life, one that she understands fundamentally and innately. That violence simply occurs.”
― C.J. Leede, Maeve Fly

“I'm crying because I have nothing...nothing left for you.'
This made the witness very sad. He didn't want to be left out, so he began to cry, too.
'Wait', the gray boy said. 'For you, my brightest disciple, I have something special. I give all I have left...' The gray boy slipped his fingers through his ribs and tore out a piece of his heart and offered it to the witness. 'Take and eat, for this is my body' he said. The witness remarked that it tasted like Wonder Bread soaked in the juices of deiced Del Monte vegetables with just a pinch of sugar. He never felt happier in all his life. Now he belonged.”
― Clay McLeod Chapman, Whisper Down the Lane

“The thing about making it to old age is that not everyone else will. That means you get to sit back and watch the world slip away from you, one tragedy at a time. First it was her friends, the Texan and the laudanum-loving doctor and that odious lord I nearly married (sometimes, death is a mercy).”
― Gwendolyn Kiste, Reluctant Immortals

“We send out the Voyager probes into interstellar space in a big-hearted fanciful spasm of hope. Two capsules from earth containing images and songs just waiting to be found in – who knows – tens or hundreds of thousands of years if all goes well. Otherwise millions or billions, or not at all. Meanwhile we begin to listen. We scan the reaches for radio waves. Nothing answers. We keep on scanning for decades and decades. Nothing answers. We make wishful and fearful projections through books, films and the like about how it might look, this alien life, when it finally makes contact. But it doesn’t make contact and we suspect in truth that it never will. It’s not even out there, we think. Why bother waiting when there’s nothing there? And now maybe humankind is in the late smash-it-all-up teenage stage of self-harm and nihilism, because we didn’t ask to be alive, we didn’t ask to inherit an earth to look after, and we didn’t ask to be so completely unjustly darkly alone.”
― Samantha Harvey, Orbital