Sisyphus

“He had killed the Bowman Peter Williams, and years later had been tricked into eating his shrivelled head, which seated its longing deep in his marrow and its waking in the empty ventricles of the monster’s leather soul. Now it was waking up.”
― Brian Catling, The Cloven

“The self will not be forced under, nor will the baby's needs gracefully retreat. The world tips away when we look into our children's faces.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year

“It's like we're all going up a flight of stairs together and at a certain point I say 'this is as far as I go'. And on that step, higher up, they're all happy and I watch them from below. Had he always been like that? It wasn't shyness or reserve or adolescence, as other people thought. He wasn't going to get over it. He could dance when he was alone, he could get emotional in his room with a book, but when the party started he disconnected, the others turned into a movie that he could watch but not participate in. So he acted like he was invisible, which wasn't hard when everyone was drunk. And he withdrew into his room, where he felt the purest kind of relief.”
― Mariana Enríquez, Nuestra parte de noche

“The pain was unbearable. She wanted to cry or scream, but the crawling hollow ache had plugged and sandpapered away all her expressions of self. Those indulgences had been banished forever. Suicide had always been a fiction. A thought that had only ever been a quote in her head. Something for the underclasses, those weak in mind or purpose. Poor people and cowards. Now it sat on her heart like a warm toad. Cherishing the place as a natural habitat.”
― Brian Catling, The Erstwhile