Marlene Wessel

“On any one day on Wy'East, one million living things lose their lives. They die, are killed, are shredded, fade out, are gulped, expire, decease, pass from this plane, cease to function, demise, commence decomposition, transition to the next stage, initiate cellular breakdown. This is the way it is. Some live a day, and some live a thousand years. Some are smaller than this comma, and some are taller than you can measure with your eye. Some are serence and eat sunlight and rain and do not slay theyir neighbors and do not battle for supremacy and sex and speak a patient green language. Others are vigorous and furious and muscular and speak the languages of blood and bone. This is the way it is...They change, they morph, they evolve, they go extinct, they sink back into the earth from which we all came and shall return. This is the way it is. It may be that every death is mourned, though most go unremarked, and every day's million deaths causes a million other hearts to sag. Who is to say that is not the way it is?”
― Brian Doyle, Martin Marten

“She wondered sometimes if it wasn't all pretense—if, when she shut her eyes and wished restitution upon the whole wounded parade of humanity, she wasn't really wishing away the world that created war and illness so that she might have a world in which there was room to feel sorry for herself.”
― Danielle Evans, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self

“It was easy to be somebody else when no one cared who you were in the first place.”
― Danielle Evans, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self

“But what did it matter what she deserved, faced with the hilarity of one more person telling her glibly that better was out there when she was begging for mediocrity and couldn’t have that?”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections