Presley Tapken

“The real tragedy is, of course, by always looking outward, by focusing so intently on the other person’s experience, we lose touch with our own. It’s as if we live our entire life pretending to be ourselves, as impostors impersonating ourselves, rather than feeling this is really me, this is who I am. That’s why, these days, I repeatedly force myself to return to my own experience: not are they enjoying themselves? But am I? Not do they like me? But do I like them?”
― Alex Michaelides, The Fury

“Humanity is awful, angry, and violent. But we are also magical and musical. We dance. We sing. We create. We live and laugh and rage and cry and despair and hope. We are a bundle of contradictions without rhyme or reason. And there is no one like us in all the universe.”
― T.J. Klune, In the Lives of Puppets

“We are all the unreliable narrators of our own lives.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Fury

“Man surprises me most about humanity. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”
― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century