Toxin

“I realize I am about to cry, because it is all entirely true, and the betrayal has opened a wound in me I think could split me in half.
"I'm sorry," says Cora, cowed. Her face is a crumpled flower, and I meet it with guilt.
"Never mind," I say. She wants me to console her, and I would, but I feel spread so thin that there is nothing in me left to give. Who will console me? Who thinks of how I feel?”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“I am not made for this, but Cora is. She skips lightly from stone to stone, vivacious and bright and so unencumbered. Jealousy is not an emotion I have easily tolerated in myself before, but it spills out now, raw and vicious, a blade turned against my own heart. I am jealous of Cora's passion and carelessness, but most of all I am jealous that she can experience all these things at an age when I held myself under such rigid control, when I was a creature made only from fear and survival. I am jealous that anybody has the gift of growing up differently.”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“I am a drowning woman clinging to a wreckage, but I will sing so loud as I go down.”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“Oh, let it be a night of lyric rain
And singing breezes, when my bell is tolled.
I have so loved the rain that I would hold
Last in my ears its friendly, dim refrain.
I shall lie cool and quiet, who have lain
Fevered, and watched the book of day unfold.
Death will not see me flinch; the heart is bold
That pain has made incapable of pain.”
― Dorothy Parker, The Complete Poems of Dorothy Parker