Niki’s Reviews > Hungerstone > Status Update

‘I was so unbearably lonely, a light-starved plant pressing its leaves against a windowpane, keening for the sun.’

‘Her charm was difficult to deny, like the warmth of the sun that turns your face to it even as you know you will be burned.’

‘To want is to surrender to uncertainty. To step into the unknown. To expose ourselves to all possible outcomes and trust we will not be destroyed by disappointment.’

‘A friendless child in a friendless world makes life a job of survival.’

‘What is a monster but a creature of agency?’

‘It was easier to avoid the pain when there was nowhere for it to go.’

“It is terrible to be alive. But it is worse to be dead to ourselves.”

‘One way to ensure my future was to populate it not with people who cared for me but with people for whom it would be deeply inconvenient if I were to be absent.’

‘To be exposed as vulnerable, as not knowing, was the greatest danger possible; death, at least, offered certainty; to be vulnerable meant being at the mercy of others, one’s whole selfhood at risk.’