Clavain

“A CAVE I will never, ever get out of, you said: your exact words. A cave that probably has other people in it, maybe a lot of them, and sometimes you think you can hear them around you or behind you or ahead of you, talking, crying, pounding on the walls, but you can’t be sure because the pain is making you crazy, and to be crazy is to have more noises in your head than usual. A cave that can disguise itself as a morgue, or a coroner’s office, or a courtroom, or a bedroom, or the bathroom, you said: a cave you carry around with you like a chair you have to sit in wherever you go, and, to everybody else, it just looks like a normal chair, but to you it’s the top of a slide, and every time you sit down on it you head down into the depths.”
― John Darnielle, Devil House

“You were a child I didn't want. I didn't want you because I'm a raven and you're a lamb."
'"I know this."
'"You hated yourself throughout your whole life because you're a lamb, not a raven. Briars tore your wool to bits on the tors. Wild foxes yapped at your paws. But you were safe, for your foulness made you too foul for wolves' food and wolverine delight. How many times when the mental heart shies from suicide, the physical body listening to its mental counterpart becomes sick. In a cold, gray country, no one cares whether a bum lives or dies. Not being able to be a raven, you tried to make yourself into a wolf. But, being a lamb, you were too dumb. You, lamb, were too dumb to live in this world and too dumb to die in this world."
'The lamb didn't say anything.
'"You ask me," the Virgin Mother said, "if there's anything else. For lambs. Anything except the impossibility of being
alive and of dying. There is everything else. There're animals who live only at night; there're animals whose beings are mirrors, who are only what they imitate; there're animals whose physical movements're sexuality; there're animals who speak to each other in complex ways.
'"All of these animals," the mother made her child know love, "who're more capable than you rejoice in you, for you need love so desperately.”
― Kathy Acker, Don Quixote

“I was all a mistake! There was a black fish swimming among all those white fish and that black fish was chosen to be me. I was a sister to none of them, I was ill chance itself, I was a shark, an infant black shark. Why did you not recognize it and cut its throat? What kind of merciful father were you who never cared for me but sent me out into the world a monster? Crush me, devour me, annihilate me before it is too late! Wipe me clean...”
― J.M. Coetzee

“If they were all identical, there would be reason to throw up your hands and lose hope. But they were still people, the bearers of the spark of reason. And here and there in their midst, the fires of the incredibly distant and inevitable future would kindle and blaze up. They would kindle despite it all. Despite all their seeming unworthiness. Despite the oppression. Despite the fact that they were being trampled with boots. Despite the fact that no one in the world needed them, and that everyone in the world was against them. Despite the fact that at best, they could expect contemptuous, puzzled pity.

They didn't know that the future was on their side, that the future was impossible without them. They didn't know that in a world belonging to the terrible ghosts of the past, they were the only manifestation of the future”
― Arkady Strugatsky, Hard to Be a God