Monika

“Dates only make us aware of how numbered our days are, how much closer to death we are for each one we cross off. From now on, Punzel, we're going to live by the sun and the seasons.' He picked me up and spun me around, laughing.'Our days will be endless.”
― Claire Fuller, Our Endless Numbered Days

“You can see eleven stars appear over the horizon if you don't look for more.”
― Emily Fridlund, History of Wolves

“Women who do not marry wither up - they wither up like aspidistras in back-parlour windows; and the devilish thing is that they don’t even know they’re withering.”
― George Orwell, A Clergyman's Daughter

“What would people in their old lives be saying about these girls? Would they be called missing? Would some documentary program on the ABC that nobody watched, or one of those thin newspapers nobody read, somehow connect their cases, find the thread to make them a story? The Lost Girls, they could be called. Would it be said, they 'disappeared', 'were lost'? Would it be said that they were abandoned or taken, the way people said a girl was attacked, a woman was raped, this femaleness always at the centre, as if womanhood itself were the cause of these things? As if the girls somehow, through the natural way of things, did it to themselves. They lured abduction and abandonment to themselves, they marshalled themselves into this prison where they had made their beds, and now, once more, were lying in them.”
― Charlotte Wood, The Natural Way of Things