Erik Welsh

“Death is a fascinating thing. The human mind continually returns and returns to death, to mortality, immortality, damnation, salvation. Some fear death, some seek it, but it is in our human nature to wonder at the limits of human life, at least. When you are sick like this you begin to wonder too much. Death is at your shoulder, death is your shadow, your scent, your waking and dreaming companion. You cannot help, when sleep begins to touch your eyes, but to wonder: What if? What if? And in that question, there is a longing, too much like the longing of a young girl in love. The sickness occupies your every thought, breath like a lover at your ear; the sickness stands at your shoulder in the mirror, absorbed with your body, each inch of skin and flesh, and you let it work you over, touch you with rough hands that thrill.
Nothing will ever be so close to you again. You will never find a lover so careful, so attentive, so unconditionally present and concerned only with you.
Some of us use the body to convey the things for which we cannot find words. Some of us decide to take a shortcut, decide the world is too much or too little, death is so easy, so smiling, so simple; and death is dramatic, a final fuck-you to the world.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“Aren’t they supposed to be hiring someone else to train me full-time anyway?”
“Yes,” he said, getting up and pulling her to her feet along with him,“ and I’m worried that if you get into the habit of making out with your instructors, you’ll wind up making out with him, too.”
“ Don’t be sexist. They could find me a female instructor.”
“In that case you have my permission to make out with her, as long as I can watch.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Fallen Angels

“A vast mirror hung above his desk, its gilt frame a horror of twisted vines and sharp leaves, angry looking foliage. I thought of it as Eden Lost. The first occasion I was alone in the room I stepped to the glass and touched my reflection with a finger. It was the only time I’d seen myself in a mirror, but the glass was so wavy I could have been staring into water. I was struck by how much my mouth tipped downward in a child’s pout, and I hadn’t realized I watched the world through my eyelashes. I didn’t observe myself for very long. My eyes were the same shape as my mother’s, curved like wings; watching them made me lonesome.”
― Susan Power, The Grass Dancer

“A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is thereby a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.”
― Ansel Adams