Judy Thomas

“Who were you? When you were alive?” Emily said, her voice thick with wonder. “Tell me everything.” “Oh, I wasn’t anybody. Just a girl. I lived in a house like girls do. I loved a man once, loved him so much I couldn’t tell the difference between him and me. But he wasn’t the kind of man anyone should love. He took my heart and he took it and pinched it to death. If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn’t love as much in eighty years as I could in a day. So I married someone else and had a child, like girls do. But my heart stayed pinched. Every time I tell the story, people swoon and say it’s dreadfully romantic, but it was horrible and I died halfway through my own story! I don’t know what’s wrong with the living! They think the blackest, most poisonous things are romantic. At least he’s dead now, too. He tries to talk to me but I stick my fingers in my ears until he goes away.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Glass Town Game

“Well!” said Charlotte, and she meant to say something more, something clever, something brave, but she simply had not been prepared to stare down an army of frogs today.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Glass Town Game

“In every society there are inequities, and in America the most obvious of these affect people of color and the poor. Demagogues recruit by uniting a disenchanted element against an enemy, then promising to use religion or politics or a combination of the two to bring about rightful change.”
― Jeff Guinn, The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

“I am not sure what the appropriate gesture is to make toward the family of the woman who bit off your ear, but if you felt absolutely compelled, I certainly wouldn’t take food.”
― Grady Hendrix, The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires