Meggie

“Will you let me stand beside you on your plot of earth? We'll tell the weeds to grow tall around our ankles, and when the wind gives us sycamore seeds, we'll raise them as sprouts, seedlings, saplings until they overpower, shade, and nurture us. Our trees will grow for two hand years or more as our union becomes even more unquestionable and strong.”
― Emily Habeck, Shark Heart

“As I grow longer in the tooth, I find myself shaking off for greater and greater stretches of time, and I always use this time to fret morosely about my health in general, and about the likelihood that a grave illness, conceivably located in the bladder region, will overtake me in the future, maybe imminently. In this way a pleasurable, natural act becomes the catalyst for somber reflections and an unnatural, incipient depression. So much of life follows this pattern exactly, I think, We begin to lose ourselves in a joyful or gratifying act - it can be a creature comfort or something complicatedly emotional like stimulating conversation or the solitary immersion in a poem, a beautiful landscape, or a work of art - and we forget, in the moment of serenity, all the pain and trouble of life. Until, quite suddenly, and as a rule, shockingly, this very forgetfulness, our fleeting holiday from care, becomes nothing more than another occasion to remember how truly infrequently happiness comes to us, and how likely we are to die in some hortible way. Then, disgusted with ourselves over our inability to enjoy life, we halt the pleasurable activity and move on, as speedily as we can, to other business.”
― Donald Antrim, The Hundred Brothers

“What a tragedy it is, being a woman. I would rather be a million other things.”
― Emily Habeck, Shark Heart

“But the reason she was bourgeois was so she could make work that wasn’t bourgeois. If she were cautious in her life, she could avoid compromising in her work.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow