Riva Sciuto

“How long can you live with ghosts before deciding to become one? How long until the walls become clouds and the floor opens up like clear blue sky and there’s nowhere to go but your stone tower where you are the one who chooses who to haunt and how to haunt and when to haunt. You learn how to act, to pretend, to inhabit different forms in your mind, different faces to the world, some of them terrifying, some charming, some cunning, some innocent, some a hundred feet tall, godlike, and invincible, others tiny and frail, beseeching and ironic. Five, ten, ten thousand different ghosts of your creation, one for every person you meet, one for every occasion, so many that they crowd the hallways of your castle in the sky.

But somewhere within those imaginary walls, sitting alone in the dark above the clouds, you are aware that you are none of those things. Only sad.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“It seemed like writers have the most important job in the world, to make books, to create a connection, a kind of telepathy between two minds in which one can inhabit the other.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park

“Life is not fair. You would be foolish to expect fairness, at least when it comes to matters of life and death, matters outside the scope of the law, matters that cannot be engineered or manipulated by human effort, matters that are distinctly the domain of God or luck or fate or some other unknowable, incomprehensible force.”
― Julie Yip-Williams, The Unwinding of the Miracle: A Memoir of Life, Death, and Everything That Comes After

“I feel like a blank space covered in skin. There is no place for this walking blank thing among the warm beings, the ones with something inside, the people who can have a drink and laugh at a joke and look into their features and see something other than the wretchedness I see in mine, the day that immeasurably thin skin falls away and I simply disappear. Into the ocean. My ocean. The one that will swallow me whole if I let it.”
― Mikel Jollett, Hollywood Park