Kirbi

“Not that everything "went black," nothing of the sort; only that the event itself is cloudy because of some primitive, numbing effect that obscured it at the time; the same effect, I suppose, that enables panicked mothers to swim icy rivers, or rush into burning houses, for a child; the effect that occasionally allows a deeply bereaved person to make it through a funeral without a singe tear. Other things—naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror—are too terrible to really ever grasp at all. It is only later, in solitude, in memory, that the realization dawns; when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself—quite to one's surprise—in an entirely different world.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“It's about the terror, isn't it?"

"The terror of what?"

"The terror of being found out.”
― Jon Ronson, So You've Been Publicly Shamed

“What's in that house, child, knows more than you know. What's in that house don't come out of your mind. It don't have to worry 'bout rules and behaving like a spirit ought to behave. It does what it does to fool you, it wants to trick you into believing what's not right. It's got no truth to it. What it did last week it's not gone be doing today. You see something in there, it wasn't there yesterday, it's not gone be there tomorrow. You stand at one of them doors thinking something's behind it—nothing's behind it. It's waiting for you upstairs, it's waiting for you downstairs. It's standing behind you. You think it's buried in the sand, why then, it's gone be standing behind that door after all! And you don't ever know what it is you looking for. You don't ever know what it is you gone see! Wasn't no ghost you saw, wasn't Martha Ann.”
― Michael McDowell, The Elementals

“This is how colonialism works. It convinces us that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances that demanded it.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel