Ko Clementson

“Sometimes," he told her, leaning forward over the table, speaking without realizing how it would sound, "I begin with songs. They provide a sort of skeleton grammar for me to flesh out. Songs of longing for future tense, songs of regret for past tense, songs of love for the present." He blushed when he heard what he’d said, making it worse, but she took no offense; indeed, she seemed to miss any connection that might have been taken wrongly. Instead, she seemed struck by a coincidence and looked out the café window, her mouth open slightly. "Isn’t that interesting," she said, as though nothing else he’d told her so far had been, and continued thoughtfully, "I do the same thing. Have you noticed that lullabies nearly always use a lot of command form?”
― Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

“What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning 'placed on top', 'added', 'appended', 'foreign'. Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions, but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse

“Our backs tell stories
no books have the spine to carry”
― Rupi Kaur

“Do I think they found mermaids? Yes. Of course I do. And I think the mermaids ate them all.”
― Mira Grant, Into the Drowning Deep