“This light is like honey on her lips: it flows and sticks at the same time.” - Ananda Devi
Src: The Living Days (French original, 2013)
Trans. Jeffrey Zuckerman, Feminist Press, 2019

“This light is like honey on her lips: it flows and sticks at the same time.” - Ananda Devi
Src: The Living Days (French original, 2013)
Trans. Jeffrey Zuckerman, Feminist Press, 2019
“Snowflakes were falling inside the column of light! Or rather, not snowflakes but extremely tiny birds falling toward the ground.” - Can Xue
Src: Crow Mountain
Trans. Chen Zeping and Karen Gernant, Asymptote, 2015.
"To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed." - Susan Sontag
Src: On Photography, 1977
"Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage." - Rainer Maria Rilke
Src: Letters to a Young Poet, 1929
"My sole gift or talent, I believe now, was that places could impress themselves upon me, and I could become a part of them with ease." - Jeff VanderMeer
Src: Annihilation, 2014
"She did not own herself any longer. Even her flesh could be cut and stitched without her consent or knowledge." - Octavia Butler
Src: Dawn, 1987
“And if thus small, then ladies may well wear a world of worlds, as pendents in each ear.” - Margaret Cavendish
Src: “Of Many Worlds in this World,” Poems and Fancies (1653); Academy of American Poets text.
“Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by the desire to change his bed.” - Charles Baudelaire
Src: Paris Spleen, 1869
Trans: Louise Varèse, New Directions, 1970
"Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after." - Virginia Woolf
Src: Orlando: A Biography (1928)
“Our neighbors plant bombs and machine guns, instead of flowers, in their garden soil.” - Forugh Farrokhzad
Src: “I Pity the Garden,” 1974
“If I sift those words through myself, sentences will shiver out, like the strange, sad shriek the bow draws from a metal string.” - Han Kang
Src: The White Book (Korean original, 2016)
“We touch here the hermetically sealed vases that furnish our conception of the universe.” - Maurice Maeterlinck
Src: The Life of the Bee (1901)
“Their civilizations became so successful that they forgot they were in prison. They began to think they were free.” - Ben Okri
Src: The Freedom Artist (2019)
“This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.” - Thomas Ligotti
Src: The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (2010).
“We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is.” - Stanisław Lem
Source: Solaris (1961, Polish novel)
“We are all caught in a net from which there is no escape; we are all chained to the wall of a cave.” - Stanisław Lem
Source: Solaris (1961), translated by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox
“She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening.” - Angela Carter
Source: The Lady of the House of Love (1975, short story)
“While the women were engaged in scientific research, the men of this country were busy increasing their military power.” - Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain
Source: “Sultana’s Dream” (1905).
“Man is something that shall be overcome. Man is a bridge and not an end.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Also sprach Zarathustra, 1883–1885).
“The eerie tale fulfills our need to escape, at least occasionally, from a mechanistic world, ever more definable, ever more predictable, and, therefore, ever more unsatisfying and frustrating.” - Robert Aickman
Source: introduction to The Third Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories