Jesse Bare

“But when Dahlia caught sight of The Book—It’s Up to You: The Cancer To-Do List—she was momentarily thrown off guard. It was slim and isolated, all by itself way over in Diseases (Other). It had a sort of amusing, harmless, captive dignity, like a Yorkie in a giant cage marked CAUTION.”
― Elisa Albert, The Book of Dahlia

“And he feels admiration for her, and tells her so, and she laughs, shy and flattered, and lets him take his first photograph, a photo of her, just tell me how you want me, she says, standing in front of the romanticized battlefield, and he issues hesitant instructions, but whatever he says, she does meekly, and he understands why she loves photography, why he used to love it too, it creates the illusion of complete control, a few square inches of the world in which no disappointment, fear, or sorrow exists.”
― Anjet Daanje, The Remembered Soldier

“With the advent of this weather bats began to stir from somewhere deep in the cave. Ballard lying on his pallet by the fire one evening saw them come from the dark of the tunnel and ascend through the hole overhead fluttering wildly in the ash and smoke like souls rising from hades. When they were gone he watched the hordes of cold stars sprawled across the smokehole and wondered what stuff they were made of, or himself.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Child of God

“Ursula K. Le Guin, the speculative fiction writer, acknowledged that anger was useful in resistance to injustice, but she warned that it’s “a tool useful only in combat and self-defense.” Le Guin went on to critique the anger used in second-wave feminism: “If feminism was the baby, she’s now grown past the stage where her only way to get attention to her needs and wrongs was anger, tantrums, acting out, kicking ass.” Only if laws again oppress us do we have the right to access anger. “We’re not at that point yet, and I hope nothing we do now brings us closer to it.” Dear Ursula: We are at that point. And we have been at that point all along.”
― Darcey Steinke, Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life