『...........❀ chrysanthemum ✄.............』

“If Earth was such unworthy soil for God's best specimens, why did he perversely plant them there?”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“Because your soul must be lonely. That silence you heard, when you tried to pray—that’s the sound of God listening.”
― Emma Donoghue, The Wonder

“I try to imagine the same line paired with the Polaroids Strane took of me at fifteen, my heavy-lidded eyes and swollen lips, or with the photos I took of myself at seventeen, standing before a backdrop of birch trees, lifting my skirt as I stared at the camera, looking like a Lolita and knowing exactly what I wanted, what I was. I wonder how much victimhood they'd be willing to grant a girl like me.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“Terror unendingly renews with advancing age. Without end, it returns us to the beginning. The beginning that I glimpse on the edge of the grave is the pig in me which neither death nor insult can kill. Terror on the edge of the grave is divine and I sink into terror whose child I am.”
― Georges Bataille, My Mother / Madame Edwarda / The Dead Man