Alphareader - Danielle Binks

Am I sounding creepy? Love is sort of creepy. When you fall in love, you presuppose all sorts of things about the person. You superimpose all kinds of ideals and fantasies on them. You create all manner of unrealistic, untenable, unsatisfiable criteria for that person, automatically guaranteeing their failure and your heartbreak. And what do we call it? Romance. Now, that’s creepy.

'Creepy and Maud' by Dianne Touchell

- Saga by Brian K. Vaughan (Writer) Fiona Staples (Artist)

The jury foreman's eyes twitch, then fall. "Guilty". Even before he says it, I feel departments in the office of my life start to close up shop; files are shredded, sensitivities are folded into neatly marked boxes, lights and alarms are switched off. As the husk of my body is guided from the court, I sense a single little man sat at the bottom of my soul. He hunches over a card table under a naked low-watt bulb, sipping flat beer from a plastic cup. I figure he must be the janitor. I figure he must be me.

'Vernon God Little' by DBC Pierre 

The armies of the ambitious. For them, the future was like a giant oxygen mask, as if there was nothing to breathe in the present. When the present was all there was ever going to be.

'Paint it Black' by Janet Fitch

I wish we could go back in time and climb trees together again. I love you, Vera. I always will.

'Please Ignore Vera Dietz' by A.S. King

Sometimes you know in your heart you love someone, but you have to go away before your head can figure it out.

'Walk Two Moons' by Sharon Creech

At Evensong one night, while Holly played her sax and Mrs. Bethel Utemeyer joined in, I saw him: Holiday, racing past a fluffy white Samoyed. He had lived to a ripe old age on Earth and slept at my father’s feet after my mother left, never wanting to let him out of his sight. He had stood with Buckley while he built his fort and had been the only one permitted on the porch while Lindsey and Samuel kissed. And in the last few years of his life, every Sunday morning, Grandma Lynn had made him a skillet-sized peanut butter pancake, which she would place flat on the floor, never tiring of watching him try to pick it up with his snout. I waited for him to sniff me out, anxious to know if here, on the other side, I would still be the little girl he had slept beside. I did not have to wait long: he was so happy to see me, he knocked me down.

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

-Melina Marchetta, Quintana of Charyn

Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink

'The Year of Wonders' by Geraldine Brooks