Nickole

“There is a limit to how much we can hold, and how much we can keep in this world. It’s not a good idea to cling to the things you can’t bear to lose. That’s how we break, you see?”
― Kelly Barnhill, When Women Were Dragons

“Sometimes, I feel that we are all tricked by love, and its rigid requirement of pain. We find the love of our lives and cleave to our beloved when we are still quite young and do not yet understand that we must, by our nature, die someday. In any successful marriage, one partner must face the reality of being very old, and very alone. What is grief, but love that’s lost its object?”
― Kelly Barnhill, When Women Were Dragons

“Time, in our experience, is linear, but in truth time is also looped. It is like a piece of yarn, in which each section of the strand twists and winds around every other - a complicated and complex knot, in which one part cannot be viewed out of context from the others. Everything touches everything else. Everything affects everything else. Each loop, each bend, each twist interact with each other. It is all connected, and it is all one.

But every once in a while, there are experiences that slice all the other moments apart - stark, singular things that mark the difference between Before and After. These moments are singular, separate from the knot. Separate even from the thread. They can't be tugged at or loosened. They cannot be wound into something lovely or intricate or delicate. They do not interact seamlessly with the fabric of a life. .They are of another substance entirely. Unstuck in time, and out of sync with a life's patterns and processes.”
― Kelly Barnhill, When Women Were Dragons

“Perhaps this is how we learn silence - an absence of words, an absence of context, a hole in the universe where the truth should be.”
― Kelly Barnhill, When Women Were Dragons