Kennedy Harder

“Maybe this was how married people got boring so suddenly, with one nano-compromise after another until they lived in a thoroughly half-assed world. But if being married meant being boring, then being boring meant absolutely everything to him.”
― David Yoon

“Did I understand the fragrance and heft? The too-sweetness of the pulpy flesh? Had I ever felt the fatality of autumn like my bones did now, while I watched the pensive currents of foot traffic? A muted hopelessness pressed on me. I lay under it. At that point I couldn’t remember the orchards, the blossoms, the life of the apple outside of the city. I only knew that it was a humble fruit, made for unremarkable moments. And yet it carries us into winter. It holds us steady.”
― Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

“It was the golden time of year. Every day the leaves grew brighter, the air sharper, the grass more brilliant. The sunsets seemed to expand and melt and stretch for hours, and the brick façades glowed pink, and everything got bluer. How many perfect autumns did a person get?”
― Elif Batuman, Either/Or

“When they first came for us with their bullets, we didn’t stop moving even though the bullets moved twice as fast as the sound of our screams, and even when their heat and speed broke our skin, shattered our bones, skulls, pierced our hearts, we kept on, even when we saw the bullets send our bodies flailing through the air like flags, like the many flags and buildings that went up in place of everything we knew this land to be before. The bullets were premonitions, ghosts from dreams of a hard, fast future. The bullets moved on after moving through us, became the promise of what was to come, the speed and the killing, the hard, fast lines of borders and buildings. They took everything and ground it down to dust as fine as gunpowder, they fired their guns into the air in victory and the strays flew out into the nothingness of histories written wrong and meant to be forgotten. Stray bullets and consequences are landing on our unsuspecting bodies even now.”
― Tommy Orange, There There