alittlemonstrous

“There is nothing like a horror film to reveal the cultural anxieties of one’s time and place. And if horror has taught me anything, it is that nothing has been as enduringly terrifying across time and place as women’s bodies, as the bodies of all marginalized genders.”
― Tania De Rozario, Dinner on Monster Island: An Intimate Collection of Essays Exploring Queerness, Cultural Monsters, and Personal Growth

“The strange thing, on looking back, was the purity, the integrity, of her feeling for Sally. It was not like one's feeling for a man. It was completely disinterested, and besides, it had a quality which could only exist between women, between women just grown up.It was protective, on her side; sprang from a sense of being in league together, a presentiment of something that was bound to part them (they spoke of marriage always as a catastrophe), which led to this chivalry, this protective feeling which was much more on her side than Sally's. For in those days she was completely rckless; did the most idiotic things out of bravado; bicycled round the parapet on the terrace; smoked cigars. [...] But the charm was overpowering, to her at least,[...]”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“What is it like to disregard the body? How do we get around ourselves when we are always in the way? I wonder how badly the serpent wants the loop to end, to consume himself until the flesh is gone. Is that possible? What would that look like, that nothing-space? To complete the autocannibalism of revisiting one’s own trauma, for it to be over?”
― Alice Lesprenance

“You're not a monster,' I said.
But I lied.
What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.
I read that parents suffering from PTSD are more likely to hit their children. Perhaps there is a monstrous origin to it, after all. Perhaps to lay hands on your child is to prepare him for war. To say processing a heartbeat is never as simple as the heart's task of saying yes yes yes to the body.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous