Matt Bean

“He stood in the center of the square where the tracks of commerce lay fossilized in dried mud all about him, turning, an amphitheatrical figure in that moonwrought waste manacled to a shadow that struggled grossly in the dust.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

“fingerprints fall all around me, into great indistinguishable peaks and slopes. The stars look like cusps, everything looks like a cusp. The streetlights still flow, the night smells like a new dime, and the mailbox seems to shine with the accumulation of all it has ever received. The seminarian is laughing and waving me toward the open door, but I am not cold and I am not coming back just yet. Places for people, wide spaces and small, little bodies floating down into their forms. I run even toward the church, till I can see the Marian grotto hidden on one side where the garden is pinched out like a series of matches. It is almost Christmas Eve. Tomorrow, in that church, the songs I like best will flame out their brief lives, there and then gone, while the people hold soft and slumping candles under their chins and circles of cardboard catch the notes of hot wax. They will return again next year.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy: A Memoir

“Judging them for what they couldn’t do then, and even what they can’t do now, doesn’t make anything better. Their inaction does not define them because they also did so many great things and I love them both, and I cherish the relationships I have with them. And selfishly, as a parent, I would want some of that slack, too. In case my kids write a tell-all book about me in 2059, I want to instill in them that I’m always going to be there for them, and I’m going to mess up, and when I do, I will be empathetic, I will apologize, and I’ll do better. Most importantly, I’ll keep talking with them until they feel better. So far, it’s working.”
― Paul Scheer, Joyful Recollections of Trauma: A Hilariously Cathartic Memoir-in-Essays of Childhood Turmoil, Self Healing, and Finding Happiness

“It was only with the beginning of a settled way of life that you got towns, settlements, monocultures, and technology—all the things that are harmful to the prospects for humanity.”
― Werner Herzog, Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir