avery !!

“It was, she supposed, a way of defying death. Necessities helped people survive, but joyful excess gave them life.”
― Annalee Newitz, Automatic Noodle

“A mystery is the most seductive of poisons; it intoxicates the soul.”
― Silvia Moreno-Garcia, The Bewitching

“I am an author, and I, for one, am deeply offended by the notion that my "waywardness, peevishness, Irascibility, misanthropy, and murky passions" are caused by a "derangement of bodily health," even as I am impressed by a nineteenth-century magazine's ability to absolutely nail my personality.”
― John green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“I'd worked my whole life to acquire the technical, the emotional skills to make those paintings. I'd chopped tomatoes and peeled half-eaten onion rings off plastic trays for thousands of hours. I'd painted in grief, weeping and painting, painting and weeping. There were probably weeks, whole months when I did not smile even once. I lived in a studio so small I could smell my neighbor's farts. I spent every penny I had on canvas, brushes, paints. I killed myself. I killed my love. I forced myself to forget my husband, my brother. My country. My son.

It's easy for people who have sacrificed nothing to rationalize their own ordinariness by calling me lucky. But I sacrificed my entire life; I sold it to the abyss. And the abyss gave me art.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!