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“And if you could constantly reinvent yourself, cut away the parts of you that ashamed or hurt you, then how could you ever come to really know someone else? Were people all just living paradoxes, keeping up an illusion just long enough to survive contact with others?”

- R.F Kuang, Katabasis, pg. 214

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“Life, after all, has not slipped free of its netting. There is no such life, slipping free: life is itself the netting, holding people in place, making sense of things. It is not possible to tear away the constraints and simply carry on a senseless existence. People, other people, make it impossible. But without other people, there would be no life at all. Judgement, reproval, disappointment, conflict: these are the means by which people remain connected to one another.”

- Sally Rooney, Intermezzo (p. 304)

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“What does he have to tell him anyway. I just want to say, I'm on your side. I know I've never done anything to help you, Ivan, but in principle, in spirit. I've been on your side all along.”

- Sally Rooney, Intermezzo (p.234)

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“To feel that his life has been preserved somewhere and not forgotten, gathered around him, packed protectively around him still.”

- Sally Rooney, Intermezzo (p. 10)

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“Life, she understands, is a collapsing down, a succession of memories held not in sequence but together, occurring and recurring all at once. She's in her father's kitchen at the age of twenty-four, but so is she at aged five, aged nine, aged eleven. She is standing where she is with her sisters and her father is here, and yet he isn't.”

- Julia Armfield, Private Rites (p. 307)

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“Any horror story could be said to work in two pieces: the fear of being wholly alone and of realising that one has company.”

Julia Armfield, Private Rites (p. 269)

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“She can't explain it, except to say that the thought of looking like someone seems only a prelude to the thought of acting like them. How long, if you really resemble a person, can you stop yourself falling in step with them? How long until it turns out you are where they were hiding all along?”

- Julia Armfield, Private Rites (p. 218)

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“At what point, she wanted to say, do we stop being the direct product of our parents? At what point does it start being our fault?”

- Julia Armfield, Private Rites (p. 163)

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“But what about when you lose someone who is still alive? When you lose track of the person you know within a person they've become- what kind of grief is that?”

- Catherine Lacey, Pew (p. 125)

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“[W]ondering why it was that anyone believed the human body needed to be any particular way, or what was so important about a human body. Was it possible for a human's mind and history and memory and ideas to live inside the body of a horse, and if it was, did that make that being a human or a horse? What difference did it make, one life or another?”

- Catherine Lacey, Pew (p. 116)

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“If we imagine the action of a vaccine not just in terms of how it affects a single body, but also in terms of how it affects the collective body of a community, it is fair to think of vaccination as a kind of banking of immunity. Contributions to this bank are donations to those who cannot or will not be protected by their own immunity.”

— Eula Biss, On Immunity (p. 19)

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To write is to cradle myth & memory both & emerge with the fact

of your flesh. I praise the first book that touched me because it was beautiful,

— Natalie Wee, Beast at Every Threshold (p. 47)

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“The idea that unions are for people in bad jobs and that people in good jobs don't need to negotiate the terms of their service depends on the belief that good jobs are inherently good and can't be made bad, or more menial.”

— Eula Biss, Having and Being Had (p. 149)

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“Practice is all I want out of art.”

—Eula Biss, Having and Being Had (p. 59)

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“Dividing the good rich from the bad rich is a waste of time, Sherman suggests, for the rich and everyone else. "Judging wealthy people on the basis of their individual behaviors--do they work hard enough, do they consume reasonably enough, do they give back enough--distracts us from other kinds of questions about the morality of vastly unequal distributions of wealth," she writes. We shouldn't ask our rich to be good, in other words, we should ask our economic system to be better.”

— Eula Biss, Having and Being Had (p. 47)

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“What is destroyed when we think of ourselves as consumers, Graeber suggests, is the possibility that we might be doing something productive outside of work.”

— Eula Biss, Having and Being Had (p. 27)

[wapisiw]

my bb sends a pic of 2 otters + the word “us”

translated: we exist in every iteration of touch made possible

-Natalie Wee, Beast at Every Threshold (p. 16)