Sydney Y

“No penalty levied on Earth can answer the suffering of a parent wailing for her lost young. No punishment can fill the aching silence where the daily clamor of children used to be, or stir the brutal stillness they leave behind. Even if we were to set the price of one human life at another, capital punishment can’t deliver justice for multiple murder victims—nor for the wounded survivors. If a man can kill a single person and receive the exact same punishment as a murderer who massacred more than a dozen, in what sense does execution represent a proportional sentence?”
― Elizabeth Bruenig, On Human Slaughter: Evil, Justice, Mercy

“When you write, you have to take people to the closet. Not to the living room or the kitchen, not even to your bedroom. No, you take them straight to the goddamn closet, the place you keep your most secret, unmentionable things.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

“The idea that political history could play any part in my own life was still disconcerting, and slightly repellent. All the same, I realized—I’d known for years—that the widening gap, now a chasm, between the people and those who claimed to speak for them, the politicians and journalists, would necessarily lead to a situation that was chaotic, violent, and unpredictable.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Submission

“Something changed between us that day. I’d seen Debra at her worst, and I’ve found that is often what binds women together. Men admire each other when they are at their best, but women enjoy meeting each other in pits of despair.”
― Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year