Laurel

“I made a bargain in my youth, for safety, for survival, and it has all been for naught. I am not safe. I have never been safe.

So why have I tried so hard to create it? All I have made is a prison.

But perhaps if I have never been safe, that means fear has no purpose.

I am not safe if I obey and reduce and control, just as I am not safe if I rebel and shout and anger.”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“A vampire is a creature of total want, of pure appetite, an antithesis to our self-denial, and I find myself picking through the bones of the story about the tension between these two states. Appetite is a dirty word for women, a cardinal sin. For food and sex, yes, but also for power, for ambition, for violence. What is Carmilla but a woman unleashed on any limits on her appetites? Does it make her monstrous? Is what we celebrate in men always monstrous in women? Is it also not monstrous to starve ourselves, to kill our appetite until we embody a living death?”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“Before, I stood on the banister of the balcony above the dining hall and thought the solution to the burden of myself was to end it all. How foolish that seems now. How futile. I could go, and no one would care.
How much better to make them all regret knowing me.”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“Friendships are tiny interventions of love and empathy and oxytocin that calm our bodies, keep us healthy, and ready us for connection.”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends