Tegan (Slant Postscripts)

“I can't say that I ever feel what it felt like then, when I was happy. But sometimes something will touch the place where that feeling was, a touch as slight and swift as the brush of a moth's wing in the dark.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders

“Today, finishing this, I am feeling better, but perhaps, tomorrow, I will not. That is okay. It is okay not to feel better. It is okay not to produce art. There is so much pressure, in narrative, for us to 'recover', to reach 'catharsis', to find 'resolution', to 'speak out'. I offer resolution here because I have found it, but that resolution is as much truth as sleight of hand, a conjuring trick. I may never manage to 'resolve' what has happened to me. In naming it, I have learned to live with it, and this in turn breaks a pattern of suffering. Naming is, for me, a magical act: it is a way of saying daily, I am alive. I have harnessed naming to bring order to chaos. Naming maps experience into history. Contains, within it, a legacy and a lineage: it offers up a spectrum of thought. But naming cannot undo what was done. Hope, for me, is found in the telling.”
― Jessica Cornwell, Birth Notes: A Memoir of Recovery

“Night is when fear comes to us at its fullest, when we have no way to fight it. It will do everything it can to seep inside you. Sometimes it may succeed - but never think that you are the night.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

“Woman of the Sea

To the men of the sea
Who sail with the wind
And are free,
To the Land that has borne them
And the seed that has torn them
From me,
For I gave it willing, without grieving,
To the sons of my soul,
Who in seeking the truth of existence
Have quenched the starvation in me,
For I, am but woman,
And all, 'tis all I shall be.”
― Iona Matheson, In Retrospect