Melissa

“With each mile we put behind us, I felt the air grow lighter in my lungs. It was as if the city had been one large pressure cooker, simmering in its own juices. With the top down on the coupe and a stalwart, man-made breeze blowing steadily in my face, I tallied the city's many summertime brutalities: the heat that radiated from the gray asphalt and made the air dance in wavy shimmers; the stagnant ponds in Central Park that turned a milky, putrid, almost phosphorescent green and incubated countless mosquitoes; the blasts of hot dirty air that breathed upward from every subway grate; oh, and how the loud noises pouring from construction sites even somehow seemed to further agitate and heat the air!”
― Suzanne Rindell, The Other Typist

“I like to come in mid-afternoon with a book of poems and my journal, when the restaurant is changing over from lunch to dinner, when there are few if any patrons. I can relax. I can think.

Eating and drinking and relaxing and thinking. It is a wonderfully mammalian process for slipping between worlds.”
― James J. Patterson, A Secret Woman: A Novel

“I was six years old when I last peed my pants.”
― Matt Bellassai, Everything Is Awful: And Other Observations

“some days I thought it’d be better to be some other kind of critter so even if the regret still spiked a hole through me”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big