Katy Koetting

“Fear is a habit like any other, and habits kill what is essential in ourselves. I was left with a kind of blankness, Jeffers, from those years of being afraid.”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“Was love then like a bag of assorted sweets passed around from which one might choose more than once? Some might sting the tongue, some invoke night perfume. Some had centers as bitter as gall, some blended honey and poison, some were quickly swallowed. And among the common bull's-eyes and peppermints a few rare ones; one or two with deadly needles at the heart, another that brought clam and gentle pleasure. Were his fingers closing on that one?”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

“My point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“Change is also loss, and in that sense a parent can lose a child every day, until you realise that you'd better stop predicting what they're going to become and concentrate on what is right in front of you.”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place