Hannah

“...
But even if the minute hand, too quickly
squeezes the wick between its fingertips,
Joy
still looks like honey and sunshine in their eyes,
helping old mum and dad out of the car,
sagging like candle wax

as life, in a breeze, is gone already
whisking the leaves on their tombstone,
engraved,
no wind can ever erase them.”
― Ximena Escobar, The Secret Beautiful

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“I guess you can’t tell a story from the point of view of something that you don’t think has a point of view.”
― Martha Wells, Artificial Condition