Jessica Cramer

“Such a strange ritual, to send the body into the ground. I am there as they lower him. I am there as we say our prayers. I take my place in the line as the dirt is shoveled onto the coffin.

He will never again have this many people thinking of him at a single time. Even though I never knew him, I wish he were here to see it.”
― David Levithan, Every Day

“I wonder if you feel it less, with guns. If so many people are killed with so little effort, is it easier to pretend they aren't lives? That everything is fine? It's different, I imagine, from seeing flattened forms like blood ghosts on the sand or hearing the screams in the streets during the parade. No, killing should take longer than a heartbeat. Murder should be unignorable, always.”
― Micaiah Johnson, The Space Between Worlds

“With familiar archness he waggled his finger at me and said 'tsk tsk'; all that writhing and fussing began again, what fun it was for him to have someone automatically not above reproach, and I knew beyond the shadow of a hope that to be female is to be mirror and honeypot, servant and judge, the terrible Rhadamanthus for whom he must perform but whose judgment is not human and whose services are at anyone's command, the vagina dentata and the stuffed teddy-bear he gets if he passes the test. This is until you're forty-five, ladies, after which you vanish into thin air like the smile of the Cheshire cat, leaving behind only a disgusting grossness and a subtle poison that automatically infects every man under twenty-one. Nothing can put you above this or below this or beyond it or outside of it, nothing, nothing, nothing at all, not your muscles or your brains, not being one of the boys or being one of the girls or writing books or writing letters or screaming or wringing your hands or cooking lettuce or being too tall or being too short or traveling or staying at home or ugliness or acne or diffidence or cowardice or perpetual shrinking and old age. In the latter cases you're only doubly damned.”
― Joanna Russ, The Female Man

“We had noticed everything once - the water collecting on the berried ivy, the mistletoe in the dark-armed oak, the barn where the owl sat under the tiles, the smoke like a message curling up from forest-burnt fires, the ancientness of time and us part of it.

Why had we learned to hurry through every day when every day was all we had?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days