Alice Matty

“I suppose that’s what everybody wants, isn’t it. To be like everybody else. But nobody is like everybody else. That’s the one thing we have in common.”
― Paul Murray, The Bee Sting

“You go to class and discuss famous poems. The poems are full of swans, gorse, blackberries, leopards, elderflowers, mountains, orchards, moonlight, wolves, nightingales, cherry blossoms, bog oak, lily-pads, honeybees. Even the brand-new ones are jam-packed with nature. It’s like the poets are not living in the same world as you. You put up your hand and say isn’t it weird that poets just keep going around noticing nature and not ever noticing that nature is shrinking? To read these poems you would think the world was as full of nature as it ever was even though in the last forty years so many animals and habitats have been wiped out. How come they don’t notice that? How come they don’t notice everything that’s been annihilated? If they’re so into noticing things? I look around and all I see is the world being ruined. If poems were true they’d just be about walking through a giant graveyard or a garbage dump. The only place you find nature is in poems, it’s total bullshit. Even the sensitive people are fucking liars, you say. No, you don’t, you sit there in silence like always.”
― Paul Murray, The Bee Sting

“I needed to face the emptiness, an emptiness I had dreamed of so often I’d turned it into a mast, a center of gravity to hold onto when life fell to pieces around me.”
― Eva Baltasar, Boulder

“You couldn’t protect the people you loved – that was the lesson of history, and it struck him therefore that to love someone meant to be opened up to a radically heightened level of suffering.”
― Paul Murray, The Bee Sting