Yen

“That's what scares me. My life is . . . it. There's nothing else, on either end of it. I don't have remnants in the same way that you do, or a plate inside my chest. I don't know what my pieces were before they were me, and I don't know what they'll become after. All I have is right now, and at some point, I'll just end, and I can't predict when that will be, and - and if I don't use this time for something, if I don't make the absolute most of it, then I'll have wasted something precious.”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“I think our appearance is meaningless,” I sputter.
“We’re all just skeletons covered in skin.”
― Emily R. Austin, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead

“Silence is an incomplete metaphor. It can't capture frustration and complicity, its function as a retreat and a burrow. It holds a place for concealment, secrecy and deception. It holds a place for reverence. Living with a profound layer of silence wedged between yourself and your family can be such a source of sorrow, even when it is necessary.”
― Elias Jahshan, This Arab Is Queer: An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers

“I do not fear retribution; I fear what sort of person I would become by doing it.”
― T. Kingfisher, Nettle & Bone