12 Quotes by Zoje Stage

Sometimes she struggled with resentment watching her family eat a meal that she prepared. People took eating and shitting for granted, like the continuous beating of their hearts, the inevitable protection of their skin. They didn't think about their intestines doing everything wrong, fucking up the basic process of digestion.

It shamed her that she hadn't been able to escape sooner, that they'd stuck together in such a sickly, co-dependent, useless sort of life.

Maybe someday there'd be a zoo full of people. Just ordinary people sitting at a dining room table with a meal they hated. The free people would stand on the other side of the glass, watching them sniff their food in misery. In another room, children in bunk beds would have to wear pajamas all the time.

The baby wasn't supposed to remind her of an internal mass of pooling waste.

She dreaded all the necessary doctor appointments where she was supposed to surrender her own privacy and fears of being tortured for the benefit of the baby. Like it was already someone else's body and their needs superseded her own.

She resented her body's betrayal. She still couldn't express how insecure it made her, how she lived on a precipice. The most basic parts of her could fail, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

It was hard to pour endless love into someone who wouldn't love you back. No one could do it forever

She told herself it wasn't wrong to do what she most felt like doing in that moment.

Hanna loved how the pencils and crayons looked, with their pointy unused tips. She liked the quarter-size circles of watercolor paint, like frozen puddles from a dripping rainbow.