Caroline Shey

“No, I am not writing to blame these men, but I also am not excusing them by casting their behavior as something instilled in them by systems beyond their control. Almost every system we exist in is cruel, and it is our job to hold ourselves accountable to a moral center separate from the arbitrary ganglion of laws that, so often, get things wrong. This is the work we inherit as creatures with a complex brain, which comes with inexplicable joys, like love and sex and making out in cars, but also the duty of empathy, of understanding what it means when someone is stumbling.”
― Sabrina Imbler, How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures

“So I go. I travel farther and faster and harder than most, and I read, and I write, and I love cities. To be alone in a crowd, apart and belonging, to have distance between what I see and what I am.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“a reference to Freud’s 1917 paper “Mourning and Melancholia.” In the essay, Freud had proposed that melancholia arises when a patient is mourning something or someone but “cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost.”
― Rachel Aviv, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

“This wasn’t poetry. This was the aping of poetry in pursuit of validation. This was another kind of poetry theatric: If you just said enough names, people assumed you knew what you were talking about and tended to attribute the vagueness of the reference to their own ignorance.”
― Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans