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

“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

“The deep sea is a haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness.”
― Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea