Amy

“The sleeping hound of addiction was alive and well in me. It leaped up at a moment’s notice. One cigarette a day went to two and then to forty in a week. And, yes, I knew about the Orange Stuff and the Yellow Stuff, too. (It’s what I drank with Bahadur the watchman in the graveyard.) But I had kept the hound on a tight leash. I had seen enough wreckage among the drugged-out hippies in Goa to know that my life depended on hanging on to that leash and never forgetting about the hound for one single second, even when it was pretending to be asleep.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“Way I sees it is dis. If’n ya gots to hab a rule to tells ya wha’s good, if’n ya gots to hab good ’splained to ya, den ya cain’t be good. If’n ya need sum kinda God to tells ya right from wrong, den you won’t never know.”
― Percival Everett, James

“Cyrus thought about what an aggressively human leader on earth might look like. One who, instead of defending decades-old obviously wrong positions, said, “Well, of course I changed my mind, I was presented with new information, that’s the definition of critical thinking.” That it seemed impossible to conceive of a political leader making such a statement made Cyrus mad, then sad.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“Picture how the vaginal canal squeezes the water out of a baby’s lungs—it’s the shock of this squeezing and the sudden cold air that makes the baby cry out and take their first breath!” She inhaled so I inhaled, too. “The trauma itself prepares them for the next phase, life on Earth.”
― Miranda July, All Fours