Cameron Coughlin

“A statue isn't built from the ground up -- it's chiseled out of a block of marble -- and I often wonder if we aren't likewise shaped by the qualities we lack, outlined by the empty space where the marble used to be. I'll be sitting on a train. I'll be lying awake in bed. I'll be watching a movie; I'll be laughing. And then, all of a sudden, I'll be struck with the paralyzing truth: It's not what we do that makes us who are. It's what we don't do that defines us.”
― Raphael Bob-Waksberg, Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory

“Just as some cultures have a hundred words for 'snow,' there should be a hundred words in our language for all the ways a black boy can lie awake at night.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“In the end, the courage of women can't be stamped out. And stories - the big ones, the true ones - can be caught but never killed.”
― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

“Places are never just places in a piece of writing. If they are, the author has failed. Setting is not inert. It is activated by point of view.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House