Gertie

“Country’s friggin’ dying, man, you have to triage the motherfucker.”
― Jess Row, The Empties

“In the first couple of weeks there were big piles of trash outside every house. All the stuff you couldn’t find another use for and couldn’t compost. Yogurt cups, torn trash bags, dirty diapers, hair-spray cans, paper towels. Sometimes you’d see a pile that was as high as your waist. Nathan said it was a purge, a cleanse. But you could just as well say that who we were went out with the empties. We will never get our selves back.”
― Jess Row, The Empties

“She knows there are traps everywhere that can make her cry, she knows the way she dies a little every time someone asks her for change and she doesn't give it to them means that she's too soft for this world or perhaps just for this city, she feels so small here.”
― Emily St. John Mandel

“She said being human is being a young child on Christmas Day who receives an absolutely magnificent castle. And there is a perfect photograph of this castle on the box and you want more than anything to play with the castle and the knights and the princesses because it looks like such a perfectly human world, but the only problem is that the castle isn’t built. It’s in tiny intricate pieces, and although there’s a book of instructions you don’t understand it. And nor can your parents or Aunt Sylvie. So you are just left, crying at the ideal castle on the box which no one would ever be able to build”
― Matt Haig, The Humans