Abby Draper

“The uncritical civilization bears witness to its own decline in accepting myths as fact while dismissing facts as myth.”
― Monte Schulz, Metropolis

“For here was the thing that no fairy tale would ever admit, but that she understood in that moment: love was not inherently good.

Certainly, it could inspire goodness. She didn’t argue that. Poets would tell you that love was electricity in your veins that could light a room. That it was a river in your soul to lift you up and carry you away, or a fire inside the heart to keep you warm.

Yet electricity could also fry, rivers could drown, and fires could burn; love could be destructive. Punishingly, fatally destructive.

And the other thing, the real bloody clincher of it all, was that the good and the bad didn’t get served up equally. If love were a balance of electric lights and electric jolts, two sides of an equally weighted coin, then fair enough. She could deal.

That wasn’t how it worked, though. Some love was just the bad, all the time: an endless parade of electrified bones and drowned lungs and hearts that burned to a cinder inside the cage of your chest.

And so she looked down at her son and loved him with the kind of twisted, complex feeling that came from having never wanted him in the first place; she loved him with bitterness, and she loved him with resignation. She loved him though she knew no good could ever come from such a bond.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Book Eaters

“Solitary people, these book lovers. I think it's swell that there are people you don't have to worry about when you don't see them for a long time, you don't have to wonder what they do, how they're getting along with themselves. You just know that they're all right, and probably doing something they like.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Mr. Fox

“I had a dream about you last night. I was alone on a dark night and you came to me as a firefly. I knew it was you because you were the brightest.”
― Crystal Hudson, Dreaming is for lovers