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“A pretty mother on earth is better than a beautiful dead one in the sky even if she did leave you all alone to go dancing.”

~ Recitatif

Toni Morrison

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“Positions get entrenched. Nothing can be shared.”

“But surely the very least we can do is listen to what was done to a person—or is still being done. It is the very least we owe the dead, and the suffering.”

“Maggie suffered at St. Bonaventure. And all we have to do is hear about that? How can we resent it?”

“Like Twyla, Morrison wants us ashamed of how we treat the powerless, even if we, too, feel powerless. And one of the ethical complexities of “Recitatif” is the uncomfortable fact that even as Twyla and Roberta fight to assert their own identities—the fact they are both “somebody”—they simultaneously cast others into the role of nobodies.”

“But there is somebody in all these people, after all. There is somebody in all of us.”

“When applied to racial matters, it recognizes that although the category of race is both experientially and structurally “real,” it yet has no ultimate or essential reality in and of itself. But of course, ultimate reality is not where any of us live. For hundreds of years, we have lived in deliberately racialized human structures—that is to say, socially pervasive and sometimes legally binding fictions—that prove incapable of stating difference and equality simultaneously. And it is extremely galling to hear you have suffered for a fiction, or indeed profited from one.”

“We don’t always have to judge difference or categorize it or criminalize it. We don’t have to take it personally. We can also just let it be.”

“Racism is a kind of fascism, perhaps the most pernicious and long-lasting.”

“The capacity for fascisms of one kind or another is something else we all share—you might call it our most depressing collective identity.”

“Othering whoever has othered us, in reverse, is no liberation—as cathartic as it may feel.”

~ Somebody in There After All

Zadie Smith

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“I didn’t need to make sense of violence done to strangers by strangers.”

“She was only a girl who had no idea what was going to happen to her, and it wasn’t her fault, and I couldn’t help blaming her for it anyway.”

“I felt it in my wrists and my neck. Those were the places in my body where I felt his name, like someone had dug their thumbs into my pulse points and was waiting for my next heartbeat.”

“We were hard on each other. We weren’t unkind, never unkind. We girls had been taught kindness from a young age; kindness had been stressed. But there was another lesson in that, one the adults hadn’t known they were teaching, how kindness could be expected of a girl, demanded of her really, and then levied against her.”

“His gaze wasn’t threatening. (On the other hand, how could it not be threatening when a man like that looks at you?)”

“I was a nervous kid. When dad painted the living room a toasty cinnamon, I pressed my cheek to the walls, walked my fingers down it, and worried about how the previous color, the pale blue it used to be, must feel trapped underneath.”

“The sadness was one thing, but the fear was another. I could do nothing with it, and it would not leave me.”

~ My Murder

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All the Hellish Cruelties of Heaven

“That mirrored moment of recognition: that is a human. Then, the blissful bite of revelation: that is a human undone.”

“Throughout the ages, humanity asks over and over again “why are we here?” and then pretends as if the Void does not bellow the answer back every single time. We are here to hurt each other. Again, and again, and again, in perpetuity.”

Exile in Extremis

“I think, maybe, being alive is the stupidest thing any of us will ever do. To keep at it, like somehow things will right themselves.”

Jaqueline Laughs Last in the Gaslight

“She loves her man more than she loves their God.”

“Outside the bed they pray to God, inside the bed they say a sort of prayer to each other.”

“God is blind. Whether that blindness is the result of cowardice or shame, she cannot discern.”

“Much of her love of the Church was the result of exchanging one sort of stage for another. If one could play at sanctity, could one not also play at villainy?”

“In daylight, cut knuckles and bruised bones are evidence of wounding. In candlelight, every injury is an invitation.”

The Mother of All Monsters

“It was a relief when she was found, if for no other reason than we could start to forget about her.”

Telesignatures from a Future Corpse

“Nobody wins against an absence.”

~ We Are Here To Hurt Each Other

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“He doesn’t need her to be beautiful, just brilliant. That’s how she’ll reel him in.”

~ A Lesson in Cruelty

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“The first eighteen years of my life, all anyone had done was dote on me, tell me how special I was. But ever since I’d left home, my family, the church—ever since I’d entered the “real world”—all anyone did was tell me I wasn’t. I still hadn’t quite figured out who I wanted to be right.”

“The thing about danger is, it always has a face. It chooses whether to show it to you or not.”

“So, that’s why the night was acting so strange, I thought. It was scared.”

“Fear manifests differently in everyone. It thrives in certain throats.”

“Nothing terrified me more than this. The notion that without a choice we inherit parts of us that we cannot change. Cannot cut out.”

“With all the scar tissue I’d built up, I forgot how easily I could be split open.”

“I wondered what the difference was between being told to have faith and to be quiet. I suspected there wasn’t one.”

“He leaned over and kissed me, and I tasted the sweetness of hope. For once, I allowed myself to savor it, without worrying about what it might do to my teeth.”

~ Black Sheep

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“Hill House, she thought, you’re as hard to get into as heaven.”

“The house was vile. She shivered and thought, the words coming freely into her mind, Hill House is vile, it is diseased; get away from here at once.”

“It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope.”

“‘All the time I’m here I’m going to be terrified,’ Theodora said, ‘thinking one of those hills will fall on us.’ ‘They don’t fall on you. They just slide down, silently and secretly, rolling over you while you try to run away.’”

“Certainly there are spots which inevitably attach to themselves an atmosphere of holiness and goodness; it might not then be too fanciful to say that some houses are born bad. Hill House, whatever the cause, has been unfit for human habitation for upwards of twenty years.”

“‘It’s not nice to think of children growing up like mushrooms, in the dark.’”

“Gossip says she hanged herself from the turret on the tower, but when you have a house like Hill House with a tower and a turret, gossip would hardly allow you to hang yourself anywhere else.”

“How simple he is, how transparent; he believes every silly thing he has ever heard.”

“Fear and guilt are sisters.”

“Around her the trees and wild flowers, with that oddly courteous air of natural things suddenly interrupted in their pressing occupations of growing and dying, turned toward her with attention, as though, dull and imperceptive as she was, it was still necessary for them to be gentle to a creation so unfortunate as not to be rooted in the ground, forced to go from one place to another, heartbreakingly mobile.”

“I might explain better by saying that it is a form of automatic writing; a method of communicating with—ah—intangible beings, although to my way of thinking the only intangible beings who ever get in touch through one of those things are the imaginations of the people running it.”

“It is so cold, Eleanor thought childishly; I will never be able to sleep again with all this noise coming from inside my head; how can these others hear the noise when it is coming from inside my head? I am disappearing inch by inch into this house, I am going apart a little bit at a time because all this noise is breaking me; why are the others frightened?”

“No; it is over for me. It is too much, she thought, I will relinquish my possession of this self of mine, abdicate, give over willingly what I never wanted at all; whatever it wants of me it can have.”

“‘It was going to happen sooner or later, in any case,’ Eleanor said. ‘But of course no matter when it happened it was going to be my fault.’”

“‘How long have we been here?’ Eleanor asked suddenly. ‘A little over a week. Why?’ ‘It’s the only time anything’s ever happened to me. I liked it.’”

“Hill House itself, not sane, stood against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, its walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

~ The Haunting of Hill House

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“We cling to our memory of them more dearly than the real thing. Because to us they are more real than reality. Because reality is a terrible thing.”

“He heard every silence. Noticed every absence. When it mattered, it was louder than any sound ever could be, but not loud enough to drown out the repetitive thought.”

“Darkness seems so empty sometimes. But if you stop and look, really look where there’s no light, you’ll see that it’s anything but. It’s the very fabric from which we make our own terrors.”

“It’s only when we peer into darkness that we realize that the horror isn’t out there. It’s in us.”

~ Grey Noise

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“Just like heaven. Everybody wants a little piece of lan'. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It's just in their head.”

“As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment.”

~ Of Mice and Men

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“I remember the fierce love and devotion as much as I remember the violence.”

“My father’s hands were soil. My mother’s were rain. No wonder they could not hold one another without causing enough mud for two. And yet out of that mud, they built us a house that became a home.”

“At her darkest, she was the place you could bleed to death in without a single open wound.”

“Dust enters into his ears and makes a great racket in his head. A racket we can’t understand because we don’t have to suffer it like he does.”

“What it boiled down to was a frenzied hope that there was more to life than the reality around us. Only then could we claim a destiny we did not feel cursed to.”

“She was a woman so lovely, mirrors grieved in absence of her. She was much more than her beauty. But no matter how many miles of fantastic wonders I saw inside my mother, she was already gone to me in a million different ways, even when I thought she was right in front of me.”

“I thought about standing with her and raging together against everything, but I wasn’t sure how to be that type of daughter to that type of mother.”

“I try to find the child within me as if she still lives.”

“You know what the heaviest thing in the world is, Betty? It’s a man on top of you when you don’t want him to be.”

“God made us from the rib of man. That has been our curse ever since. Because of it, men have the shovel and we have the land. It’s right between our legs. There, they can bury all their sins. Bury ’em so deep, no one knows about ’em except for them and us.”

“I couldn’t understand how she’d endured it. I could understand even less how her heart had survived knowing her own mother was the one who carried her to the devil’s bed. What do you do when the two people who are supposed to protect you the most are the monsters tearing you to pieces?”

“It’d be so much easier if the bad things in our lives were kept in our skin that we could shed off like a snake. Then we could leave all the dried horrid things on the ground and step forward, free from them.”

“I was too damn young. Only nine years old and I was floating over the world, seeing fathers ruin their daughters. Brothers ruin their sisters.”

“I wished my father would whittle us enough money to buy ourselves a past, free from brutality. One where daughters do not have to fear their father in the bedroom. One where sisters do not have to fear the approach of their brothers.”

“Later, maybe we will be happy. But today we put out flowers for who we once were. We are the girls who have just now realized we’ve been praying wrong this entire time you’ve been inside us.”

“She was a woman used and left by humanity in ways only we know how to consume and leave.”

“Nailed to the cross of her own gender, a girl finds herself between the mother and the prehistoric rib, where there’s little space to be anything other than a daughter who lives alongside sons but is not equal to them.”

“I wanted to see if no still meant somethin’.”

“Each wrinkle was a record of this and of every hour, minute, and second she had lived. All her secrets were written in her skin. The things she had asked God for. The things she had cursed the devil about. In such age before me, I saw only beauty.”

“I want to describe my little brother in long songs, but there is no long song for a boy who only lived ten years. There is only the brevity.”

“I think between the two of them they could have been pretty good at love. Too bad grief made myths of everything.”

~ Betty

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“Besides, I’m beginning to believe that anything I do to extend my life is just going to be outweighed by the agony of living it.”

“He yearns for the day when he’ll be wiped clean.”

“With my father everything had always been about the fight, and I sadly realized that we would never really know each other before he passed.”

~ Knockemstiff

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“He was a creature, and creatures can’t murder. They can kill, certainly, but that was a different matter entirely. Was the spider a murderer for ensnaring the fly?”

~ The Haar

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2024 year in books part 2

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2024 year in books part 1

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“Oh boy! they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch this time! And that thought had a sibling: ‘There are right people to lynch’.”

“Most Tralfamadorians had no way of knowing his body and face were not beautiful.”

“Earthlings must be the terrors of the Universe!”

"America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.”

“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt”

"I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living."

~ Slaughter house five

Graphic Novel Adaptation

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“The implication of souls is interesting a reminder that this is not the first generation to shape itself for an omniscient eye. What is an all seeing God, capable of knowing our thoughts and intentions, if not the most effective surveillance tool ever invented. The genius of this form of religion is the way it seduces believers into performing purity in life in order to reap rewards after death and unlike surveillance state which knows only what we type and do one of the gods claim to know our intentions as well.”

“We must now ask this; what if full-blown facism is not the monster at the door, but the monster inside the house, the monster inside us. Even we whose ancestors have been victims of genocide.”

“It seems that to many people are truthful telling of history feels like treachery and must be stamped out, but if those truths are stuffed back away, they will keep haunting us and keep re-emerging in the mirror world and distorted twisted form.”

“Meanwhile the billionaires who bank roll the whole charade are safe in the knowledge that the fury coursing through our culture isn’t coming them.”

~ Doppleganger

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“People complain that women lose themselves to motherhood, but aren’t so many of the things we do an attempt to lose ourselves?”

“To be around their aggression was one thing, but to not be around it was worse: jumping at noises, forever having strange fears, of fairground rides, loud building work, dogs.”

“Wasn’t life temporary, anyway, I asked myself; wasn’t permanence a fantasy? But I couldn’t help but want it: a mirage of safety, the pretence that four walls could keep your life, could hold you present on the earth.”

“The house and I had agreed, long ago, to ignore things like this: pockets of disarray, small, hidden places where chaos broke through.”

“There was nothing we could do to take it back. Nothing in human history that said you could make things un-happen, take them away from memory, away from the mind.”

“I used to imagine her anger as a parasite that lived in her stomach, that passed through the wall of her womb to my mother, who passed it to me.”

“He would know – as I had known for years, forever – how easy it was for a body to be destroyed.”

“Wanted to do something – anything – to get rid of what I was feeling now: a bodyful of bile, more, an amount that felt barely containable within one person, one skin.”

“Tried not to think of how much easier it was for the husband – the way family could be secondary, without excuses or apologies.”

“But I was afraid, still, of things worse than me: ghosts and killers, beer-breathed men in the dark.”

“Even now, I thought someone would want me, or want to kill me; this seemed to be the same thing.”

~ The Harpy

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“If feels strange that, in a world where most people are getting under 7 hours a night on average already, a genre of lifestyle advice would surface that is actually advising us to sleep less while trying to sell us back the benefits our body is willing to give us for free.”

“In those times I’ve felt hopeless I think I’ve been waiting for hope to be allocated to me.”

~ Half-Arsed Human

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