Alicia

“If the mortal sin of the suicide is greed, to hoard stillness and calm for yourself while dispersing your riotous internal pain among all those who survive you, then the mortal sin of the martyr must be pride, the vanity, the hubris to believe not only that your death could mean more than your living, but that your death could mean more than death itself—which, because it is inevitable, means nothing.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“I propose a new calendar: not one autumn but twelve, a hundred. The autumn when the birches are yellow but still have their leaves; when the beeches are green but the birch leaves have fallen; when the oaks tint to the color of ripe apricots and the beeches yellow; when the oaks turn a cigar brown and the beeches curl up into crispy copper rolls. And so on: I’ve missed a few. But to call it all just “autumn”!”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods

“There's no such thing as a weed," Cas said. "That's a cruel term made up by people who label some plants as 'unwanted' and some as 'valuable,' as if the worth of a living thing is measured by how useful it is to another living thing. As if a plant can't gave its own intrinsic worth.”
― Sarah Beth Durst, The Spellshop

“She was struck by the discrepancy in meaning the belongings presented. That death meant not only the cessation of a life, but vast worlds of significance. A candle that might have once provided comfort in the winter darkness, a shawl gifted by an erstwhile suitor, a pheasant that recalled her poor lost grandfather. Old brass, old rag, old bird.”
― Daniel Mason, North Woods