Lauri Johnston

“The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the bare and blackened trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle. To seek out the upright. No fall but preceded by a declination. He took great marching steps into the nothingness, counting them against his return. Eyes closed, arms oaring. Upright to what? Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellite. Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“He had always thought that when sex was over, everything was over between two people. Nothing was taken or left behind with the obvious biological exceptions. Two partners disengaged and went their separate ways. No psychic filaments hung between them, stretching through the miles and days that took them farther and farther from their last encounter. If such things existed the world would be meshed over with them. No one would be able to move. Everyone would be held fast like flies caught in the web. He wanted to think he had taken nothing from Phi and vice versa, but those amorous little filings, that magnetic rust that had responded to her presence might actually be decades old particles of Ophelia Havelland lodged in his inner workings.”
― Maggie Shipstead, Seating Arrangements

“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

“Though masking is incredibly taxing and causes us a lot of existential turmoil, it’s rewarded and facilitated by neurotypical people. Masking makes Autistic people easier to “deal” with. It renders us compliant and quiet. It also traps us. Once you’ve proven yourself capable of suffering in silence, neurotypical people tend to expect you’ll be able to do it forever, no matter the cost. Being a well-behaved Autistic person puts us in a real double bind and forces many of us to keep masking for far longer (and far more pervasively) than we want to.”
― Devon Price, Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity