Here Lies the Reader

“Well, yes, I realised I needed help making sense of my depression. I needed something to help me make sense of it all. Like I needed a life raft. I realised I needed something to cling to, a raft in the storm of my despair.”
― Alice Slater

“Ironically, it is familiarity that estranges people. We repeat the same things 'til we run out of new ways to say them. Then we grow tired of saying them and of hearing them said, and our guarded silence turning into a way of life 'til we find ourselves drifting like two rudderless steamboats with their engines off.
We misstake familiarty for intimacy. It is not intimacy. All it is, is habit. And habit is a shorthand for silence.”
― André Aciman, Room on the Sea

“You can be anything you like, you know,” he replied. “There are no rules.”
― Alice Slater, Let the Bad Times Roll

“The boy’s last—only—thought was that he had been punched in the stomach. The breath was driven from him in a sudden rush. He had no time to cry out, nor, had he had the time, would he have known what to cry, for he could not see the fish. The fish’s head drove the raft out of the water. The jaws smashed together, engulfing head, arms, shoulders, trunk, pelvis, and most of the raft. Nearly half the fish had come clear of the water, and it slid forward and down in a belly-flopping motion, grinding the mass of flesh and bone and rubber. The boy’s legs were severed at the hips, and they sank, spinning slowly, to the bottom.”
― Peter Benchley, Jaws