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1 " Beth only drew back down into herself, looking from one closed face to the next with the mounting satisfaction of knowing everyone had finally decided not to pretend anymore. They hated her. She disgusted them. "
― Gretchen Felker-Martin , Manhunt
2 " But I think mostly I just wanted her to … make me real, the way you’re real when the beautiful people look at you, and talk to you, and let you fuck them. "
3 " You always could have done something, he thought as the van bounced over the speed bump at the motor pool’s threshold and passed through a loose clump of gate guards in full riot gear, faces smudged with soot, blood drying on their plastic shields. You were just afraid to be uncomfortable. "
4 " How many times had he driven through this place? How many times had he turned away from the unease he felt at seeing these wan, starving people in their shabby tents, telling himself there was nothing he could do, that he was just one person in a larger system, the same way he’d watched Ferguson and Standing Rock and thought, Well, what can I do? "
5 " It was funny, she thought, that people treated her flesh like a public resource, a reservoir for all their insecurities and emotional dysfunction, when it was she who had their insides at her fingertips. "
6 " The echoes, the unfamiliar people, and the sense he’d carried all his life that wherever there was money—and money had outlasted the end of the world, as a state of mind if not in fact—he would always be uncomfortable. "
7 " The women who looked at each other in a way Beth didn’t understand, a way sealed forever within the cold and rigid bounds of cisness but which nonetheless told her without room for doubt that they couldn’t leave too soon. That was what scared her. The women who stayed silent. "
8 " The more she thought about it, imagining those soft lips opening around her tongue, those long lashes fluttering in dreamy anticipation, the more she realized that no specific moment, no single touch, was to blame. What mattered was that she’d broken the silent rule. She’d touched a girl before the girl touched her, had laid her violent hands on tender skin. She should have known better. Self-pity pressed against her mouth and nostrils like a sodden rag. I’m a girl until a real one decides I’m not. "
9 " Community is when you never let go of each other. Not even after you’re gone. "
10 " It's the fucking chromosome crusaders. "
11 " Even here, at the gates of hell … dyke drama reigns supreme. "
12 " The end had left them stiff and fragile, unable to accept that the suburbs were gone, that there was no more escaping the mob, no more pretending floors and toilets scrubbed themselves and reading about black people in monthly book clubs the way you’d read about the construction of London’s sewers or the history of the fur trade, as a kind of boutique curiosity, instead of actually talking to them. "
13 " I know the world's dead, but that means we get more of a say in what happens to the people left in it, not less. "
14 " It was actually good that the world had ended, because now no one could make her play Settlers of Catan. "
15 " She says there may be a lot of them, but they’re the same stupid white women who thought pussy hats could overthrow the government. They’re complacent narcissists used to publishing unreadable papers and letting men do their dirty work. She says when it comes to blood, they’ll be worthless. "
16 " That was what scared her. The women who stayed silent. "
17 " It made him think of his last summer on the farm and, for some reason, of the night his grandfather, uneasy, not understanding, but with love, had shaved his head at his request with a pair of ancient clippers. If that’s what you want, tiger. "
18 " There had always been radfems in New England, enclaves of sneering middle-class white women who talked a lot about performing gender roles and appropriating lived experience. They curated incestuous little social media cells where they repeated the same six talking points to the same thirty other women while cis men came sniffing around their hindquarters, venting pent-up hatred on trans women and making sure real women saw them doing it so they could get accredited as feminists and maybe, if they were lucky, catch a whiff of pussy. "
19 " Beth's smile widened as she nocked a carbon arrow and drew to the bow's full extension, the muscles in her long, thick arms standing out. She squinted along the arrow's shaft. 'Lick my taint,' she whispered, and took the shot. "
20 " She’d eaten more balls than she’d ever sucked cocks. "
