moon

“I think of Barthes again. A writer is someone who plays with the body of his mother, he says after the death of his own mother, in order to glorify it, to embellish it.

...I change, embellish, and preserve you all at once.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Being beautiful, was that for men?'
'Yes. Some women say that it is for ourselves. What on earth can we do with it? I could have loved myself whether I was hunchbacked or lame, but to be loved by others, you had to be beautiful.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“You're not a monster,' I said.
But I lied.
What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.
I read that parents suffering from PTSD are more likely to hit their children. Perhaps there is a monstrous origin to it, after all. Perhaps to lay hands on your child is to prepare him for war. To say processing a heartbeat is never as simple as the heart's task of saying yes yes yes to the body.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Let’s not name it. Once you name something, you have to define it: say what it is and isn’t. Not to mention maintenance. All the relationships with names – parent, sister, husband, lover – come with maintenance. All that effort keeping it to what it’s supposed to be. Shouldn’t we allow ourselves at least one unnamed, undefined close relationship in our lives? A free-standing, wild-card arrangement. How about it, Joseph? How about you just try to make me happy, and I’ll try and do the same for you?”
― Ronan Hession, Panenka