James Hutchison

“So the days passed into weeks and the weeks into months, and gradually she too faded until many years later when I came across a photograph of us together on a hillside in Greece, our only holiday. A photograph I'd long forgotten tumbled from its envelope carrying the perfume of her after all those years. That perfume! It would be on the pillow, on my shirt, in every room. Now I breathed it in and was back among the cypresses of a monastery in Greece. We had walked for hours to the garden above the sea. We were given minted honey and yogurt and cool retsina by a young monk. Evening came and it was time to return to the hotel. She asked if we could stay in the monastery and the young monk said yes. And in an ancient stone cell, she fell asleep. I lay awake listening to her soft breathing. A bone in her foot cracked. A tiny cry in the throat. Even the chanting of the monks in the early morning did not wake her.

And now there was only this photograph, the ghost of her smiling at me in the shade of cypress trees.”
― Gabriel Byrne, Walking with Ghosts

“When I’m writing, I’m trying to immerse myself in the chaos of an emotional experience, rather than separate myself from it and look back at it from a distance with clarity and tell it as a story. Because that’s how life is lived, you know? Life is not lived 10 years ahead of itself—there’s a lie to that. The conventional wisdom is—people say this all the time—you should only write something when you’re far enough away from it that you can have a perspective. But that’s not true. That’s a story that you’re telling. The truth of it is here, right now. It’s the only truth that we ever know.”
― Charlie Kaufman

“Taste is not, despite attitudes to the contrary, delivered divinely from above. Taste is decided by the wealthy, the powerful, the victors. Taste is often more about gatekeeping and upholding division than anything else.”
― Sophia Benoit, Well, This Is Exhausting

“Not belonging is a terrible feeling. It feels awkward and it hurts, as if you were wearing someone else's shoes.”
― Phoebe Stone, The Romeo and Juliet Code