avery !!

“It was, she supposed, a way of defying death. Necessities helped people survive, but joyful excess gave them life.”
― Annalee Newitz, Automatic Noodle

“The consumptive poet cannot be in the snow, only lying in the house in the snow. For me, anyway, this way of understanding chronic illness--as being of the world but also no permitted by circumstances or the social order to be entirely WITH the world--is a sentiment applied from within rather than from without, a way of thinking about the limits and opportunities of disability that acknowledges the difference and loss without othering or romanticizing. It's not trustful or loving or soothing or mild. It's true.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“I'd worked my whole life to acquire the technical, the emotional skills to make those paintings. I'd chopped tomatoes and peeled half-eaten onion rings off plastic trays for thousands of hours. I'd painted in grief, weeping and painting, painting and weeping. There were probably weeks, whole months when I did not smile even once. I lived in a studio so small I could smell my neighbor's farts. I spent every penny I had on canvas, brushes, paints. I killed myself. I killed my love. I forced myself to forget my husband, my brother. My country. My son.

It's easy for people who have sacrificed nothing to rationalize their own ordinariness by calling me lucky. But I sacrificed my entire life; I sold it to the abyss. And the abyss gave me art.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“Could someone plateau at twenty-four? Could your brain shrink? She felt tired and listless all the time. Often, she was sad for no reason.”
― Silvia Moreno-Garcia, The Bewitching