Lurdes Oliveira

“When I’m old and dying, wheezing my guts out, my organs failing, I want to walk out the front door of some old farmhouse on my own land, maybe forty, fifty hectares of it. I want to find a cool place in the woods under some old oak tree and settle down there and die as the sun comes up. I want a death rattle, a final breath, a body intact that can then be torn apart by scavengers, riddled with worms, my limbs dragged off to feed some family of little foxes, my guts teeming with maggots, until I am nothing but a gooey collection of juices that feeds the fungi and the oak seedlings and the wild grasses. I want my bleached bones scatted across my own land, broken and sucked clean of marrow, half buried in snow and finally, finally, covered over in loam and ground to dust by the passage of time, until I am broken into fragments, the pieces of my body returned to where they came. I could give back something to this world instead of taking, taking, taking. That’s the death I want. The death that means the most to me. That is the good death, the best death, and that is the death I wish not only for myself, but for you, too. Our lives are finite. Our bodies imperfect. We shouldn’t spend it feeding somebody else’s cause.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade

“I never understand,” he said, shaking his head, “why anyone would go to the trouble of making up new people in this world when there’s already billions of the buggers I don’t give a shit about.”
― Jenny Colgan, The Bookshop on the Corner

“Don't lock yourself away from those who care about you because you think you'll hurt them or they'll hurt you. What point is there in being human if you don't let yourself feel anything?”
― Sabaa Tahir, A Torch Against the Night

“If you push people away for long enough, isolation become a terrible habit. People start to believe your prefer it.”
― Amy Harmon, Running Barefoot