Sparrowapril

“First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees. The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves. Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A glide of snake belly on branch. A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. This forest eats itself and lives forever.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“He is thinking about his brain. It strikes him that it is odd to have to use the thing that may not be working to consider the thing that isn’t working.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“returned wedding gifts and penned endless notes of apology to the givers and to all our would-be-turned-would-not-be wedding guests, and if I say that I felt every word of those notes carve themselves into my skin like in that scary Dolores Umbridge detention scene in the fifth Harry Potter, I’m exaggerating, but only a little.”
― Marisa de los Santos, I'll Be Your Blue Sky

“I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane