Tara Verdia

“I sometimes imagine meeting my seventeen-year-old self. She's still here inside me somewhere. Maybe one morning in the mirror, there she'll be. I look at her with affection and understanding and hope. She sees me and backs away in horror while I try to explain why I made the choices I made.”
― Charles Frazier, Varina

“He laughed, rested his forehead on hers, and whispered on her lips, “You have stars in your eyes.”
“I can see fine through them.” She smiled at him. “They just brighten things up.”
― Cristiane Serruya, Not A Book

“Sometimes when you feel like a piece of garbage, or an alien from another planet, or more like a weapon than a real person, you have to be nice to yourself to remember how to feel human again. It's like taking care of a pet. You like cats, right? If you had a cat I know you would be buying it catnip and cat toys and fancy all-meat cat food and some kind of crazy deluxe cat bed. You'd be petting it all the time, and brushing its fur out every day so it was all fluffy and everything, right? Even if you were feeling like shit you'd take care of the cat, because that's just what you have to do when you have responsibility for an innocent animal that can't take care of itself.”

“I'm the c-cat?”

“Yeah, you're the cat.”
― spitandvinegar, Ain't No Grave (Can Keep My Body Down)

“It is, after all, almost a miracle they are here. Not because they've survived the booze, the hashish, the migraines. Not that at all. It's that they've survived everything in life, humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life, to have made it to fifty and to have made it here: to this frosted-cake landscape, these mountains of gold, the little table they can now see sitting on the dune, set with olives and pita and glasses and wine chilling on ice, with the sun waiting more impatiently than any camel for their arrival. So, yes. As with almost any sunset, but with this one in particular: shut the fuck up.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less