• “sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you’ve been ruined.” — ocean vuong, on earth we’re briefly gorgeous.
• “i am a man with a heart that offends with its lonely and greedy demands.” — sufjan stevens, john my beloved.
• “english did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a frankenstein vernacular. and robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.” — r.f. kuang, babel.
• “i could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; i would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. i would know him in death, at the end of the world.” — madeline miller, the song of achilles.
• “all they were—all they had ever been—was a pair of sunflowers who each believed the other was the sun.” — micah nemerever, these violent delights.
• “and in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what death doesn’t touch.” — donna tartt, the goldfinch.

— and much more!