Laurel Chiarella

“Steve shook his head in amazement. ‘If that GOD person hadn’t left that case, we wouldn’t have any of this.’
     Thomas agreed. ‘Personally, I can’t praise him enough.’     ”
― A.R. Merrydew, Our Blue Orange

“Somebody always had to pay, and he was glad it was not going to be him. Meanwhile he had managed to ruin the perfect marriage by turning Dick into a crayfish and making Rachael think that he had run off with another woman.”
― Max Nowaz, Get Rich or Get Lucky

“The problem with bearing fanatical witness to this kind of human depravity is that ambiguity and contradiction easily overwhelm the nuance required for understanding.  There seems to me that no logic applies to our time of terror, as if it were a dream.  There was no lapse of incoherence; none of it was incomprehensible; our shared pain was not sensible then and unexplainable afterwards.  It was actually all too real all the time, and we were simply trying to navigate an uncertain passage through it in search of safety.”
― John Payton Foden, Magenta

“Imagine your worst day, multiply it by a hundred, and pray to your God
that you never experience what some of the people in this war zone go
through, everyday, without any hope of it getting better. Ever. Compared
to these people, every day, no matter how bad, is the best day ever. I
know nothing about pain, nothing about suffering and hopefully never will.”
― Hendri Coetzee, Living the Best Day Ever