Fraser Hansen

“It is a strange thing, to desire your best friend; two pairs of hands wandering past boundaries, asking forgiveness rather than permission; "Is this OK?" coming a fraction after the motion.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“What you're trying to say is that it's easier for you to hide in your own darkness, than emerge cloaked in your own vulnerability. Not better, but easier. However the longer you hold it in, the more likely you are to suffocate.
At some point, you must breathe.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“I read about a town once where a coal fire has been burning underneath it for twenty years. All it took was a minor explosion in a tunnel to set off an inferno that will burn for the next hundred years. Pain and fear are like that, an explosion that sets the genes alight. I imagine the flames racing along inside the dogs, like coal seams catching fire.”
― Catriona Ward, Sundial

“And what were these terrors? They were buried beneath the impossible language of the time, lived underground where nearly all of the time’s true feeling spitefully and incessantly fermented. Precisely, therefore, to the extent that they were inexpressible, were these terrors mighty; precisely because they lived in the dark were their shapes obscene. And because the taste for obscenity is universal and the appetite for reality rare and hard to cultivate, he had nearly perished in the basement of his private life. Or, more precisely, his fantasies.”
― James Baldwin, Another Country