amy

“Before she lost words—when she was still able to use them to write—she sometimes wished that her own expressions would more closely resemble inarticulacy: a moan or low cry. The sound of suffering through bated breath. Snarling. Humming in one's half-sleep to pacify a child. Stifled laughter. The sound of two people's lips pressing together, pulling apart.”
― Han Kang, Greek Lessons

“and I thought, this is what it was to be blessed---
to know a love that was beyond an owning, beyond
the body and its needs, but went straight from wild
thing to wild thing, approving of its wildness."
(The Wild Divine)”
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things

“All the animals - human, bird, and pig - had felt something larger than themselves that they were a part of, families, flocks, or something bigger and less definable. Now, I feel only the absence of something like love, of something like faith, of purpose, meaning, of appreciation for anything. But, I don't want to have to eat to get these things back. Or else, I want to eat but the thing I want to consume is the food humans lovingly make for themselves and for each other: home-cooked meals, and tea, and hot milk, and things like that.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“Happiness could be felt as a pressure, too, Louis realized, more hard-edged and solid than longing, even. In Clarinda he had yearned for better in a formless way, desire like a gray milk churn; in fact he'd been so poor in Iowa that he couldn't settle on one concrete noun to wish for -- a real father? A girl in town? A thousand acres? A single friend? In contrast, this new happiness had angles. Happiness like his was real; it had a jewel-cut shadow, and he could lose it.”
― Karen Russell, Vampires in the Lemon Grove: Stories