Bethany Cunha

“The worst thing about smart women is that they smell the stupidity on everyone else.”
― Gabino Iglesias, House of Bone and Rain

“The sperm says to the egg: Knock knock. The egg says: I’ve no reason to let you in. There are no guarantees. And yet, the egg opens up. And yet, the sperm wriggles in. And yet, two packets of information merge. That’s how all of us got here. That’s how nothing turns into something. That’s how a bare ball of rock ends up with gulls and shearwaters, with moss and lichen, with unfurling pale green leaves and scuttling millipedes and rabbits and foxes. That’s how we get life.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“She was a tragic figure, but she didn’t seem to see it. She had a grandiose manner, and was fond of using long, exotic words – bagatelle, mellifluous, distinctive – like weird drapey silks you might find in a box in your grandmother’s attic. Her actual clothes, however, were not drapey; she wore a combination of dungarees and frilly blouses, a look that Elaine called ‘Victorian petrol station’.”
― Paul Murray, The Bee Sting

“Cass couldn’t deny it: she had been disturbed by the project. It wasn’t just the garage; she was up to her neck in climate change too. Looking at Instagram, eating an ice cream, switching on a light: her most casual act left a toxic trace behind – as if she had a marauding shadow-self that choked the very world she lived in. For weeks she had moped around, paralysed by the inescapability of her own evil. She would stand on the threshold of the back garden, looking at the flowers and grass and the trees in the distance, imagining everything turning black, the birds and the insects falling out of the sky. Even on good days, like when Elaine gave her a bracelet she had two of, she would remember suddenly all of the animals that were going extinct and how the earth was going to flood and everything was doomed – because of the Barnes family.”
― Paul Murray, The Bee Sting