Jennifer

“Influenza killed more people in a year than the Black Death of the Middle Ages killed in a century; it killed more people in twenty-four weeks than AIDS has killed in twenty-four years.”
― John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

“What does it mean, you see, that the first ting every American child knows about Germany is Hitler? What if the first thing you knew was something else? And maybe some people would say that now it's important, after the Second World War, it's ethical and vital that Hitler is the first thing a child knows. But someone else can argue the opposite. And what would it do, how would it change things, if nobody were allowed to know anything about Hitler, about the war, about any of it, until first they learned about Brahms, Beethoven, and Bach, about Hegel and Lessing and Fichte, about Schopenhauer, about Rilke - but all this, you had to know first. Or one thing only, the Brahms Piano Quintet in F Minor, or the Goldberg Variations, or Laocoon - one of those things you had to know and appreciate before you leaned about the Nazis."

"But the world doesn't work like that."

"No, it doesn't." He smiled in that vague way, as if amused by a joke only he had heard. "But what does it mean that it doesn't? And what would it mean if it did?”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“The thing about not breathing is no one tells you how addictive it is. That tingling rush, the buzz in every neuron as they eat through oxygen stores and reach for more and find nothing. It feels like a billion miniscule teeth digging into your brain. A shimmering wave of needle pricks starting in your lungs and skittering up your brain stem like a silvery centipede and spreading over your whole scalp, numbing you like a drug.”
― Leah Raeder, Cam Girl

“If Blondie here wanted to watch me fuck his smoking-hot girlfriend, I was down. And if she wanted to watch me bang him, fine. I'd do them both. I wasn't picky.

I wanted to be touched. So badly.”
― Leah Raeder, Cam Girl