Jillian DeSimone

“It’s shocking to wake up in one world and find yourself in another by nightfall, but the situation isn’t actually all that unusual. You wake up married, then your spouse dies over the course of the day. You wake up in peacetime and by noon your country is at war; you wake up in ignorance and by the evening it’s clear that a pandemic is already here.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“While I appreciate the freedom to live anywhere we want, and I love visiting those places, I do feel a sharp sense of loss knowing I can't see the people I consider my queer family on a daily basis. That is, I don't want to see my loves once a year. I want to see them every day. Enough to be sick of them. I want to rummage through their fridges, talk shit on their porches, tuck their plant cuttings into my pockets to bring home. I want them to let themselves into my house with their own keys. I want them to borrow so many of my books that my shelves look spaced and slanted, like a mouth full of crooked teeth. Watching the lesbians in the Wild Side West's garden, grey hard and laughing so hard they had to get thumped on the back. That's it. That's what I really want. That's the goal.”
― Krista Burton, Moby Dyke: An Obsessive Quest to Track Down the Last Remaining Lesbian Bars in America

“My point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“Life, too, goes by contraries. It is by turns crushing and restorative, busy and boring, awful and absurd and comic and uplifting. We can't get away from this constant amalgamation of feeling, can't strain out the ostensible impurities in pursuit of some imaginary essence. And we shouldn't want to if we could. The world, in all its complexities, calls on us to respond in kind. So that to be conflicted is not to be adulterated--it is to be complete.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: A Memoir