Clergyman's

“He holds Willem so close that he can feel muscles from his back to his fingertips come alive, so close that he can feel Willem’s heart beating against his, can feel his rib cage against his, and his stomach deflating and inflating with air. ‘Harder,’ Willem tells him, and he does until his arms grow first fatigued and then numb, until his body is sagging with tiredness, until he feels that he really is falling: first through the mattress, and then the bed frame, and then the floor itself, until he is sinking in slow motion through all the floors of the building, which yield and swallow him like jelly. Down he goes through the fifth floor, where Richard’s family is now storing stacks of Moroccan tiles, down through the fourth floor, which is empty, down through Richard and India’s apartment, and Richard’s studio, and then to the ground floor, and into the pool, and then down and down, farther and farther, past the subway tunnels, past bedrock and silt, through underground lakes and oceans of oil, through layers of fossil and shale, until he is drifting into the fire at the earth’s core. And the entire time, Willem is wrapped around him, and as they enter the fire, they aren’t burned but melted into one being, their legs and chests and arms and heads fusing into one.”
— Hanya Yanagihara

“She refuses to take the easy way out by accepting the get-out-of-jail-free card that I offered her. She refuses to be allowed mistakes and though I know she will still make them because she is human, she will learn faster from them than someone who chooses to accept the excuses.”
— J.A. Redmerski

“According to Kant’s late work on the Principles of Politics (1793), the irreducible problem of the human species is the following: the human being is an animal and thus, to live peacefully with other animals of its kind, absolutely needs a master.”
— Gregg Lambert