Marl

“I still felt the burden of my involuntary role as a mammal dragging me down. In the same way that a night of sleep put wrinkles in a bedsheet, just being alive took a toll. To talk to someone you had to move the flesh on your face. You bathed to get rid of the grime that built up on your skin and clipped your nails because they kept growing. I exhausted myself trying to achieve the bare minimum, but it had never been enough. My will and my body would always disengage before I got there.”
― Rin Usami, Idol, Burning

“I don’t really feel anything. I haven’t felt anything in months. It’s fascinating how busy my friends are with being the center of their own worlds, and my parents have never been very involved or perceptive of my inner life. I get good grades and I don’t act up, so they’ve never needed to understand me. Unlike my brother, who gets mediocre grades and struggles with making friends and therefore gets all of their focus and attention and energy. Decades later my mother will throw out a casual remark about how easy I was as a teenager. And I’ll be shocked anew that she never knew, that she never even tried to know.”
― Lamya H., Hijab Butch Blues

“To die for God is not a proof of faith in God. To die for an unknown and repulsive convict who is a victim of injustice, that is a proof of faith in God.”
― Simone Weil, The Simone Weil Reader

“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”
― James Baldwin