Jamie Benner

“I wish I could live underwater. Maybe then my skin would absorb the sea’s consoling silence.”
― Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban

“There's too much blank sky where a tree once stood.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“Some days later, I understood what he was trying to say, that getting grown means learning how to work that current: learning when to hold fast, when to drop anchor, when to let it sweep you up.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“We have no prisons, after all." I thought about that, and found that I knew what prisons were. Humans often locked up their lawbreakers in cages. Prisons. "No Ina prisons? Why?" "None of us are willing to spend our lives in prison with the lawbreakers. Maintaining a prison isn't quite as unpleasant as being a prisoner in one, but it's bad enough. And levying fines would be meaningless. It's too easy for us to get money form the human population. For lesser crimes, most likely we amputate something.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Fledgling