Stacey Venter

“She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness. The iron door settled shut behind them, the weight”
― Joe Hill, NOS4R2

“You know how when a woman gets angry, really angry, she can reach way back into herself and find rage enough to blow any man to pieces”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“Most people have no idea how much of themselves they store off-site. Your personality is not just a matter of what you know about yourself, but what others know about you. You are one person with your mother, and another with your lover, and yet another with your child. Those other people create you—finish you—as much as you create you.”
― Joe Hill, The Fireman

“As babies we are trapped in a strange, alien world, unable to see properly, and in a constant state of surprise at our bodies, alarmed by hunger and wind and bowel movements, overwhelmed by our feelings. We are quite literally under attack. We need our mother to soothe our distress and make sense of our experience. As she does so, we slowly learn how to manage our physical and emotional states on our own. But our ability to contain ourselves directly depends on our mother’s ability to contain us – if she had never experienced containment by her own mother, how could she teach us what she did not know?”
― Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient