“Cats are assholes. I get it. But do you know why people like cats, despite their asshole-ness? It’s because they don’t fucking talk . If they did, and they were all like you, they’d all be extinct because we’d have killed you all by now.” ~ Matt Dinniman, Dungeon Crawler Carl
Such liberty and abandon, such fearful defiance. They were brilliant in their avarice, quarrelsome beyond imagining, ready to die for bad and good ideas alike. ~ Ian McEwan, What We Can Know
Taking my assigned cue once more, all the world being if not a stage then at least a farce, I cleared my throat and intoned my line as if it were gospel truth. “I listen with a good heart.” ~ Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
Whenever I am told to go back to where I came from, I can’t help but think: Why don’t you go where I came from? You’d love it there. ~ Omar El Akkad, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
“Look at them. They’re pretending, they behave as though they still have some control over their lives and make momentous decisions about which vegetable to cook first.” ~ Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men
...when we know about suffering, when we are proximal to it, we are capable of extraordinary generosity. We can do and be so much for each other. But only when we see one another in our full humanity. Not as statistics or problems, but as people who deserve to be alive in the world. ~ John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis
When their eyes had locked, he’d squeezed Ilya’s fingers, just a little. That look, and that squeeze, had said so many things to Ilya. I know. We were supposed to stand alone at the top, but we will always be there together. ~ Rachel Reid, Heated Rivalry
“They walk and walk. No one stops. It’s like we’re all still infected. We choose to be blind to each other’s suffering. It might make things easier to bear, but our hearts are cold.” ~ Sequoia Nagamatsu, How High We Go in the Dark
“In my old age, I see that life itself is often more fantastic and terrible than the stories we believed as children, and that perhaps there is no harm in finding magic among the trees.” ~ Eowyn Ivey, The Snow Child
Life mattered. It had dignity and purpose. There was some part of her — a Self, an essential Cece — that was immutable. Safe from corruption. The part of her that loved to swim; that came up with dorky aphorisms; that couldn’t hear a song from her childhood, no matter how cloying or obnoxious, without leaping up to dance....What was life, if she lost that? ~ Eric Puchner, Dream State
“And on and on it goes, in a thousand directions, everything occurring at once, in a great storm of the present, of now — all those lovely wrecked lives.” ~ Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins
“We step out of our solar system into the universe seeking only peace and friendship — to teach, if we are called upon; to be taught, if we are fortunate.” ~ Becky Chambers, To Be Taught, If Fortunate