“Hands and lips and teeth, and you’d forgotten-no, you’d never known-this way of knowing someone, this dissolution of self, this autophagy.”
— Alaya Dawn Johnson
“Then you remember that Jack–that’s his name, the mac & cheese–plays lacrosse. That’s probably where he got all those yummy muscles. You need two hands for lacrosse.A pinky? Damn, you might as well starve yourself.”
— Alaya Dawn Johnson
“Amid all that blood of the dying sun, the verde was still alive.”
— Alaya Dawn Johnson
“So I take my lover, my king, and I put him in a pedestal and I cut him down. A man, like the ones who ruined the world.”
— Alaya Dawn Johnson
“After everything that’s happened, her fear of requesting a prescription or of asking Trevor about his mother baffles her. Shouldn’t life-altering events make you less afraid of the little stuff? But it’s the little stuff that paralyzes her: talking, eating, dressing, sleeping. Everyone in school is afraid of the apocalypse; she is afraid of living through it.”
— Alaya Dawn Johnson
“The summer kings are gods, and we are finally, in the end, just men.”
— Alaya Dawn Johnson
“Gods are what people worship. Men are what die.”
— Alaya Dawn Johnson
“The past stands in the path of the future, knowing it will be crushed.”
— Alaya Dawn Johnson
“In the dark, I seem to stretch. Without a body to witness, I grow and grow with my pleasure. I feel like a constellation, a concept hung on a scattering of stars.”
— Alaya Dawn Johnson