"Greg Adkins"

“There will be no redemption because the men who run this place do not want redemption. They want to be as near to hell as they can.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist

“Aya overflows with ache, or power. When the accent is taken off it, ache describes, in English, bone-deep pain. But otherwise ache is blood…fleeing and returning…red momentum. Ache is, ache is is is, kin to fear—a frayed pause near the end of a thread where the cloth matters too much to fail. The kind of need that takes you across water on nothing but bare feet. Ache is energy, damage, it is constant, in Aya’s mind all the time. She was born that way—powerful, half mad, but quiet about it.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, The Opposite House

“You are not a tragedy, you are a personal essay. You must rise above and you must do it in the last paragraph with basic grammar and easily recognized words.”
― Edwidge Danticat, The Best American Essays 2011

“Where do you see yourself in ten years’ time?” she asked. My answer: “Not sure, but maybe on a beach reading a really good mystery. Not a murder mystery, but the kind where the narrator has to find out what year it is and why he was even born .”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours