alexandra

“The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of.

So that’s why I need to be cured. Unless I’m cured, normal people will expurgate me. Finally I understood why my family had tried so hard to fix me.”
― Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman

“I need your teeth in me, slow and vicious, to tell me my armor is just skin, bones, only bones.”
― Jamaal May, The Whetting of Teeth

“Girl gets; girl gets; girl gets. Not that she is granted things but that things keep happening to her, until they don’t—until she starts doing unto others as they have done, hurting everyone who ever hurt her, moving the world with her mind, conducting its objects like an orchestra.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

“Giving without expectation of return was not thought to be a higher, more selfless act; quite the contrary, it was aggressive, it set the giver up as superior to the recipient, causing the recipient to lose face; it imposed a burden of gratitude without permitting the relief of reciprocation. Because a gift contained in itself something of the essence of the giver, a gift gave him power over the beneficiary. In some societies a gift retained, rather than passed along, could cause serious harm to the recipient—even death. In some ancient languages, the word “gift” had a second meaning: poison.”
― Larissa MacFarquhar, Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help