Onyx

“What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.

I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“I was bi and my heart was off-limits to no one, at least not for any reason like what they had between their legs or whether their chests were flat or round. And maybe because of that I never really could believe or understand that Griff, or anyone else, could be deterred from falling in love by such a trivial thing as gender.”
― Ben Monopoli, The Cranberry Hush

“Your father's impressive.''He's a scary motherfucker, but we get along well.”
― Aleksandr Voinov, Gold Digger