Books
"I was paralyzed, of course, finding out that our lives are so exactly, insanely alike. It's not fair, that she gets to say all these things, when I was the one with the stage, and I probably lived all this first, and I was getting cheated on, and I took him back, and I was doing the worse thing, the surveys, not the phone contracts, and I was older, and more humiliated, and I was paid multiple times for my body, but never because I was a model, just a whore, and then an artist."
— from Surveys by Natasha Stagg
"I don’t want to be miserable, but I also want to embrace the fucked-up, to move towards a maturity and strength that can include and express weakness and embarrassing content of all sorts without shame, to allow myself the full resonance of being a female subject (and all the other categorical adjectives that could be applied to me) living in a fucked up nation, in a fucked up world, in the 21st century."
-Dodie Bellamy, the buddhist
The liberating thing about publishing an essay collection before you are a fully formed person is that there is nothing to fear. You have no readers. No experience. No memories of doing it before. No wounds. The bad thing about publishing an essay collection at twenty-five, when the frontal lobe has barely finished developing, is there is nothing to fear. No readers. No experience. No memories of doing it before. No wounds.
Chloe Caldwell, I’ll Tell You In Person
"Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell."
-Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment
"In the morning, the brilliance is gone and all that remains is the hard, fragile edges. My insides feel smoky. I break the lamp, but that was an accident."
-Juliet Escoria, Black Cloud
