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“Recover yourself. That’s where your creativity is.”

Kate McKean in today’s Agents & Books Q&A issue.

🔖💬 “Your death matters. You can choose something that will reflect the values and beliefs that you held in your life, and translate them into your death. What you choose to do, is your final act, your final gesture on this earth.” Sarah Chavez, The Order of the Good Death

📚💬 “I endeavour to be as singular as I can.” Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World

📚💬 “When I am afraid, I can see perfectly the sensible, beautiful not-afraid side of the world, I can see chairs and tables and windows staying the same, not affected in the least, and I can see things like the careful woven texture of the carpet, not even moving. But when I am afraid, I no longer exist in any relation to these things.” Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

Substitute depressed or anxious for afraid here and it’s exactly how I feel.

💬📚 Dropping this quote here so that next time I try to hung it down I’ll find it on my own site and not have to go to GoodReads:

“She strode the earth clad in the invisible armor of their virtual companionship.” Lev Grossman, The Magician King

📚💬 Roderick Usher has sensory integration issues:

“He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses; the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odors of all flowers were oppressive…” - Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”

📚💬 “She didn’t know much about buildings, but it was clear that this one needed an unbelievable amount of work.
But at the end of it? Something she built up, rather than cut down.” Travis Baldree, Legends & Lattes

💬📚 “I hunker down with books when I need time to process what’s happening in my own life.
Books give me the space to breathe.”

• Kelly J. Baker, Final Girl: And Other Essays on Grief, Trauma, and Mental Illness

📚💬 “Disaster and hero, monster and martyr, beauty and beast . . . Choose your own dichotomy. Because it doesn’t matter. We were always built to be both.” Lana Harper, For Better or Cursed

📚💬👱‍♀️ “When Pearl Dragon and cheap wine and even magic have all failed us… there will always be Buffy marathons.” Lana Harper, Payback’s A Witch

😭 I’m not crying, you’re crying.