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“What I want to say is that I was happy. Not always, not even mostly. But I did know real, deep joy. Maybe everyone gets a certain amount to use up over a lifetime, and I just used my lifetime’s allotment especially quickly, with Leila. But I don’t think it was a tragedy, my life. Tragedies are relentless. Nobody could ask for more than what I’ve had.”
― Martyr!
― Martyr!
“When asked about the difficulties of sculpture, Michelangelo said, “It is easy. You just chip away all the stone that isn’t David.” It’s simple to cut things out of a life. You break up with a shitty partner, quit eating bread, delete the Twitter app. You cut it out, and the shape of what’s actually killing you clarifies a little. The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t fuck or steal or kill, and you’ll be a good person. Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands. A rich man goes a whole day without killing a single homeless person and so goes to sleep content in his goodness. In another world, he’s buying crates of socks and Clif bars and tents, distributing them in city centers. But for him, abstinence reigns.”
― Martyr!
― Martyr!
“What do you, specifically, want from your unprecedented, never-to-be-repeated existence?”
― Martyr!
― Martyr!
“Living happened until it didn't. There was no choice in it. To say no to a new day would be unthinkable. So each morning you said yes, then stepped into the consequence.”
― Martyr!
― Martyr!
“Cyrus also worried that the whole idea of gratitude was possibly classist, or worse. Did a poor Syrian child, whose living and dying had been indelibly shaped by the murderous whims of evil men, qualify for grace only if she possessed a superhuman ability to look beyond her hardship and notice the beauty of a single flower growing through a pile of rubble? And would the gratitude for that flower be contaminated by the awareness, or ignorance, of the bodies turning to soil beneath it?”
― Martyr!
― Martyr!
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Beatriz’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Beatriz’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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Favorite Genres
Art, Contemporary, Cookbooks, Fantasy, Horror, Non-fiction, Paranormal, Poetry, Romance, Suspense, Thriller, Travel, queer, and grief
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