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Quote by Jen Beagin

“He was one of the fortunate ones. He'd emerged from childhood a whole person and his past wasn't some vast immovable mass with its own weather system.”

Quote by Jen Beagin

Book:Pretend I'm Dead
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Pretend I'm Dead

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Jen Beagin

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“Excerpts from an autobiography I’ll never write: Around the time I was nine years old, I carried around a marble notebook everywhere I went. It had the words, “The Purpose of Life” written in sharpie where my name should’ve been. That notebook was sacred to me. I had conjured up this belief that I’d inevitably be whisked away into the afterlife once I fully discovered and was able to coherently express the “purpose of life” on those pages. In a most whimsical, literal and childlike way, I believed that there simply would no longer be a point to my existence. This wasn’t cynical or depressive at all, it just seemed… logical. Like when a student finishes their test before everyone else so they get to leave the room and go play or do whatever else they want. My notebook was filled with synonyms. I’ve always loved synonyms. I once tried to list out every single word I knew in the English language. You can imagine how overwhelming it was when I realized that one word would remind me of twenty others… That’s when I learned just how expansive this world is. I found that when small ripples turned into tsunamis of information in my mind, I felt most alive and my curiosity grew and grew. It was then I also discovered my love for figuratively drowning in words. I never finished that notebook. I decided right then that I’d pretend not to know the answers so I’d get to stay a little longer.”

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Author:Jacqueline Roche
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“In her loneliness, Lee collected a legion of animals in her room, where she left the window open to let them come and go. There were barn kittens and baby mice and tiny raccoons and little possum. They always grew up and eventually left her, but she was okay with that. Sometimes she'd see them in the woods months or years after, and they'd make eye contact, and an understanding would pass between them. It was the type of memory that she questioned now, skeptical of its plausibility. Yet, she could still remember the feeling of falling asleep with quivering fur against her cheek.”

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Book:Strange Folk
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“Life was like being dragged through concrete in circles, wet and setting concrete that dried with each rotation of my unwilling body. As a child, I was light. It didn’t matter too much; I slid through it, and maybe it even felt like a game, like I was just playing in mud, like nothing about that slipperiness would ever change, not really. But then I got bigger and it started drying on me and eventually I turned into an uneven block, chipping and sparking on the hard ground, tearing off into painful chunks.”

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Book:The Death of Vivek Oji
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