When I looked around, I saw and heard of none like me. Was I then a monster?
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

A monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.
- Ocean Vuong

Sometimes things acquire a tenderness, a monstrous tenderness we don’t expect from them.
- Herta Muller