Joel Werley

“And you're not an envoy from the lord?" "You're not an angel?" "Nope. Just a librarian." Aw, well, she said, "That's close enough for me." ~Full Throttle by Joe Hill”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“She was my mother's mother but not my grandmother in any terms I can comprehend and if her mad blood courses through me now I have no knowledge of it and am innocent of it.

"Calla": given that name by her own mother as soon as she was born; in January 1890; as if her mother had known in the agony of childbirth she could not live, thus wanted to give her infant daughter, her first- and last-born, a legacy suggestive of the grave.

So that even as a child my mother's mother was forced to consider her name specially ordained, fated: a white beyond white: the sweet waxy glaze of calla lillies, massed funeral flowers.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, I Lock My Door Upon Myself

“Alone, alone! Long she would recall the strangeness of the word, an echo aerated by melancholy vowels—alone. AT”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Book of American Martyrs

“Because we are linked by blood and blood is memory without language.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, I Lock My Door Upon Myself