Mike Finn

“But not everyone has dreams. Some people just are, the way that trees and rocks and rivers are just there without a reason, the rest of the world moving around them.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“There hadn’t been a god for many years. Not the nightgownclad patriarch of Sunday school coloring books; not the sensitive young man with the inevitable auburn ringlets Anna had stared through in the stained-glass windows at Mass; not the many-armed and many-faceted deities of the Bhagavad Gita that she’d worshipped alongside hashish and Dustin Hoffman in her college days. Even the short but gratifying parade of earth goddesses that had taken her to their ample bosoms in her early thirties had gone, though she remembered them with more kindness than the rest.

God was dead. Let Him rest in peace. Now, finally, the earth was hers with no taint of Heaven.”
― Nevada Barr, Track of the Cat

“But every life she can imagine building for herself just feels like throwing a tarp over a crime scene. It’s just another way to carve out the chunk of her brain that still holds Delilah inside. Cora is only alive right now because the story of Delilah Zeng is behind aquarium glass in her mind.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“Maybe she wants someone to teach her how to be a human the correct way, the way she never learned. Someone to wake her up and tell her what to eat, what to dream about, what to cry about, who to pray to. Because Cora somehow feels that every choice she’s made has been wrong, that every choice she will ever make will lead her deeper and deeper into a life that feels like a dark, airless box, and when she peers through the slats in the wood she’ll see the pale light of who she might have been, so bright that it blinds her.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng