Emily

“Past, present, future - a physicist might say these distinctions are illusions anyway. The human brain is subject to all kinds of misperceptions, and the waking mind not always more attuned to reality than the dreaming one.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“Caravaggio’s art is made from darkness and light. His pictures present spotlit moments of extreme and often agonized human experience. A man is decapitated in his bedchamber, blood spurting from a deep gash in his neck. A man is assassinated on the high altar of a church. A woman is shot in the stomach with a bow and arrow at point-blank range. Caravaggio’s images freeze time but also seem to hover on the brink of their own disappearance. Faces are brightly illuminated. Details emerge from darkness with such uncanny clarity that they might be hallucinations. Yet always the shadows encroach, the pools of blackness that threaten to obliterate all. Looking at his pictures is like looking at the world by flashes of lightning.”
― Andrew Graham-Dixon, Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane

“She had no wish to transform trauma to performance, to parade what she’d come to think of as her own tragedies for entertainment.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep

“because when you are in pain, sometimes the only escape is another different pain.”
― Rivers Solomon, The Deep