Dolorous Haze

“I had to be so ugly that the humiliation I brought on myself would humiliate him, too. I would have to strip every last filament of gold from my skin--all the gold I had put there--and strip the gold from his skin, so that none of the gold on him would reflect onto me, and so none of the gold on my would reflect onto him, so we would be in utter darkness together. I curled myself around his legs. I knew he'd never understand why I was doing it--that he was misunderstanding what I meant. But I didn't care if he got me wrong. The way he saw me was not the same thing as me.”
― Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?

“Family is only the tribe in microcosm. Long ago Thoacdiens realized—since their business is information, and information is not static—that, technology aside, the prime source of their capital was the unbridled imagination of each individual in each successive generation. The family is not only an inefficient system, it is a cruel one. The whole object of the family is to repeat itself, to create the future in the image of the past. Consequently it is a very effective brake on change because it keeps all children within the boundaries of cultural tradition. In the family learning is a process of psychological brutality at the end of which a child knows nothing but what is permissible to the tribe. There is no future, and no joy in the family—only the long, agonized, destructive groan of the continual death of the past. Once in a while there is friendship, but that is the exception, not the rule.”
― Mary Staton, From the Legend of Biel

“The sun began its dip behind the horizon and the walls sunk to augmented beige, and he could feel his body in the walls forty years later.”
― B.R. Yeager, Amygdalatropolis

“He wrote up the cases of his own patients who believed themselves to be someone other than themselves. There were Virgin Marys, Christs and Gods, Marilyn Monroes and Elvis Presleys. Movie stars and even characters from literature took over the lives of Ambrose’s patients. Jane Eyre sometimes screamed in an imaginary red room at Mandala.”
― Carmel Bird, The White Garden