Clavain

“Since her words have to be dead words, I only mumble back. I live in my own world of playgrounds trees animals books. I will never be intruded upon again. Or touched again. In the distance here, the river of my adoration flows long dull murky, all the way to the right and light. Lambs bleat on either side. Outside the icy air hardly impresses my flesh, for inside I'm all dissatisfactions. A cell-like shell bottles up the dissatisfactions.
'Unable to know any outside, I don't know where I am. Here's a red brick building. Here's a low, dullish brown brick edifice. Beyond's my river. Nothing's real because nothing has meaning for me because no one's touching me. No one tells me what means what. There's no schooling here. Where there's no language, there's no reality.
'This,' explained the dog, 'is why my heart is breaking.
'Cold. Wet. Dead. Low moors sitting over hidden rivers. Earth so heavy it could sink and is, into its lower geographical stratum of mud. Human heaviness heavier than death.”
― Kathy Acker, Don Quixote

“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

“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

“They’re afraid because we exist, she says. There’s nothing we did to provoke their fear, other than exist. There’s nothing we can do to earn their approval, except stop existing – so we can either die like they want, or laugh at their cowardice and go on with our lives.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky