sydney

“As a grown woman, I would have said to my father that there are true things in this world observed only by a single set of eyes.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“Sometimes, I imagine the monarchs fleeing not winter but the napalm clouds of your childhood in Vietnam. I imagine them flying from the blazed blasts unscathed, their tiny black-and-red wings jittering like debris that kept blowing, for thousands of miles across the sky, so that, looking up, you can no longer fathom the explosion they came from, only a family of butterflies floating in clean, cool air, their wings finally, after so many conflagrations, fireproof.”
― Ocean Vuong

“To know the ocean, I have always felt, is to recognize the teeth it keeps half-hidden.”
― Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea

“I'd imagine you'd be uncomfortable, with your heart full of so many forgotten things.”
― Yōko Ogawa