quotes

Happy (late) Birthday to my favorite person in the world!! I felt so happy that you enjoyed my Christmas gift and was thinking about how I could create something similar for your birthday. I have also been pondering how I can best support your hiking endeavor down the Appalachian Trail. Since we both know I won’t be contributing much financially, I thought I would at least attempt to provide you with some entertainment while you’re on your trip. Thanks to your unwavering support of my dreams, I have had the pleasure of backpacking and camping in beautiful places around the world. During these trips, I have always had company to keep me entertained and talk things through with. On the assumption that you will be alone on (at least part of) your hiking trip, you will need some content to give your mind a break from the thoughts of how beautiful the landscape is and how many miles you have to hike that day, how badly your feet hurt, etc. Oftentimes this means of distraction/entertainment is in the form of reading books. You, however, have the unfortunate limitation of not carrying too heavy of a backpack on your trip. So I have compiled a list of my favorite quotes from the books I have read over the past couple of years. There are books I have read that are not featured on this list, by virtue of my having less analytical impulses with certain types of books; I tend to read comedy and mystery books with speed and therefore less absorption of particular diction. These quotes are not always the best representations of the books themselves, but they are quotes that stuck with me and compelled me to copy them down, for one reason or another. In this way — lucky you — you’re getting some access to my psyche. As I’ve already said, my hope is that this is one means of keeping you sufficiently entertained on your backpacking trip. A low-weight, content-rich method. May these quotes bring you some sense of contentment as you embark on your hiking trip. I love you! So much!!!!!

Stand-Out Quotes (listed in order of recency read)

Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv

• Doctors left behind the study of less measurable aspects of human experience — a parallel life for psychiatry itself.
• She joined a Buddhist meditation group, to try to overcome her anger. Biographical accounts describe the Buddha enduring a period of depression, an experience that he turned into a cornerstone of his teaching: sabbam dukkham, the pain of being alive. In one story, a mother has gone mad after the death of her baby and begs the Buddha for medicine to revive her child. The Buddha agrees, with one condition: she must procure a mustard seed, a cheap Indian spice, from a family in which no one has died. Elated, the mother begins knocking on doors. By the end of the day, though, she realizes that no houses are free of death. The mother comes to see her grief as part of a universal problem of existence. She finds solace in generalizing her hopelessness from herself to the world.
• For a Black patient to reveal her fears and fantasies to a therapist, trained in a field that has been dominated by middle-class white people, requires a level of trust that hasn’t typically been earned. “Many black folks worry that speaking of our traumas using the language of mental illness,” hooks writes, “will lead to biased interpretation and to the pathologizing of the black experience in ways that might support and sustain our continued subordination.”
• In rejecting the authority of psychoanalysis, psychiatrists had hoped to rid themselves of the sway of culture and the fundamental subjectivity it implied. But the history of biological psychiatry has been marked by biases about gender and race just as psychoanalysis had been. The benzodiazepines, a class of tranquilizer celebrated as a replacement for psychoanalysis, was marketed in the seventies especially to women, to give them personalities congenial to husbands.
• In ads called “35 and Single” in the Archives of General Psychiatry in 1970, the pharmaceutical company Roche encouraged doctors to give Valium to the kind of highly strung patient who “realizes she’s in a losing pattern-and that she may never marry.” Between 1969 and 1982, Valium was the most widely prescribed medication in America, and roughly three-quarters of its users were women. In an editorial in the French journal L’Encéphale, two psychiatrists from the largest psychiatric hospital in Paris warned, “Benzodiazepines have lost their status as medications . . . and become simple domestic helpers.”
• It is joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found.
• Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear.
• Recovery does not refer to an end product or result. It is marked by an ever-deepening acceptance of our limitations.

All About Love by bell hooks

• In the Song of Solomon there is this passage that reads: “I found him whom my soul loves. I held him and would not let him go.” To holding on, to knowing again that moment of rapture, of recognition where we can face one another as we really are, stripped of artifice and pretense, naked and not ashamed.
• It had become hard for me to continue to believe in love’s promise when everywhere I turned the enchantment of power or the terror of fear overshadowed the will to love.
• Men theorize about love, but women are more often love’s practitioners. Most men feel that they receive love and therefore know what it feels like to be loved; women often feel we are in a constant state of yearning, wanting love but not receiving it.
• A woman who talks of love is still suspect. Perhaps this is because all that enlightened woman may have to say about love will stand as a direct threat and challenge to the visions men have offered us.
• Only love can heal the wounds of the past. However, the intensity of our woundedness often leads to a closing of the heart, making it impossible for us to give or receive the love that is given to us.
• Love = the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth

Foreverland by Heather Havrilesky

• Men always act like you’re the only one who’s overinvested. You can be speeding down the freeway together in the same race car, screaming “Faster, faster!” at the top of your lungs in unison, but they’re the ones who suddenly say “Who: now, I didn’t sign up for this!”
• Lust forms a tidal wave. Lust picks you up and hurls you into the sky, far above the racing ocean. You are about to be ground into the sand, but it feels like deliverance.
• Marriages survive on a wave of forgiveness. And marriages die when you can’t forgive yourself.
• Why does it feel so good to realize you’re wrong, over and over again? Maybe that’s what separates people whose marriages stick together from people whose marriages die: a little masochism and a lifelong love of learning (whether they’re actually good learners or not).
• This seemed to have been my strategy since we’d moved to the suburbs: every time you feel angry or upset or impatient with what’s happening around you, surrender to mediocrity.
• Because the resolution on your partner becomes clearer and clearer by the year, you must find compensatory ways to blur and pixelate them back into a soft, muted, faintly fantastical fog.
• Love and hate are intertwined, sometimes to the point where they’re almost indistinguishable from each other. I need you, therefore I hate you. I can never leave you, therefore you are my bunkmate in this prison we freely chose, back when we were younger and even stupider than we are now. No sooner are you saved than you start to resent your savior.
• “You know what my curse in life is?” I asked him. “Deciding if you’re good or bad and deciding if I’m good or bad, over and over again, every single day.”

Devotions by Mary Oliver

• He was positively drenched in enthusiasm, I don’t know why. And yet, why not.
• I wouldn’t persuade you from whatever you believe or whatever you don’t. That’s your business. but I thought, of the wren’s singing, what could this be if it isn’t a prayer? So I just listened, my pen in the air.
• [The otter] has no words, still what he tells about his life is clear. He does not own a computer. He imagines the river will last forever. He does not envy the dry house I live in. He does not wonder who or what it is that I worship. He wonders, morning after morning, that the river is so cold and fresh and alive, and still I don’t jump in.
• It’s more than bones. It’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse. It’s more than the beating of the single heart. It’s praising. It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving. You have a life — just imagine that! You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe still another.
• We do one thing or another; we stay the same, or we change. Congratulations, if you have changed.
• Let me ask you this. Do you also think that beauty exists for some fabulous reason? And, if you have not been enchanted by this adventure — your life — what would do for you?
• And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know? Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.
• We receive. Then we give back.
• I don’t know what God is. I don’t know what death is. But I believe they have between them some fervent and necessary arrangement.
• Sometimes melancholy leaves me breathless.
• Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell me about it.
• Two or three times in my life I discovered love. Each time it seemed to solve everything. Each time it solved a great many things but not everything. Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and thoroughly, solved everything.
• When I moved from one house to another there were many things I had no room for. What does one do? I rented a storage space. And filled it. Years passed. Occasionally I went there and looked in, but nothing happened, not a single twinge of the heart. As I grew older the things I cared about grew fewer, but were more important. So one day I undid the lock and called the trash man. He took everything. I felt like the little donkey when his burden is finally lifted. Things! Burn them, burn them! Make a beautiful fire! More room in your heart for love, for the trees! For the birds who own nothing — the reason they can fly.
• Why am I always going anywhere, instead of somewhere?
• Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us
• Eat bread and understand comfort. Drink water, and understand delight. Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds who are drinking the sweetness, who are thrillingly gluttonous. For one thing leads to another. Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot. Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in. And someone’s face, whom you love, will be as a star both intimate and ultimate, and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.
• We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many. We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness.
• When I am among the trees, especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks and the pines, they give off such hints of gladness. I would almost say that they save me, and daily. I am so distant from the hope of myself, in which I have goodness, and discernment, and never hurry through the world but walk slowly, and bow often. Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, “Stay awhile.” The light flows from their branches. And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say, “and you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.”
• I saw what love might’ve done had we loved in time

The Women I Love by Francisco Pacifico

• Now the end has come and I am filled with sorrow that our ways must part: the path I would rather take is the one that leads to life. -MURASAKI SHIKIBU, The Tale of Genji (trans. Royall Tyler)
• A person’s mind and what reveals it — laughter, syntax, running commentary — these are mainly what keep you company. When the people who’ve kept me company with their minds are no longer nearby, I force myself to forget what being near them felt like. I go out of my way not to preserve their memory and just turn them into bland copies instead.
• It’s always bothered me that intellectual desire and physical desire are so similar that they incite misunderstandings: like anxiety and allergy, united by hydrocortisone.
• While I grew up with the crazy fear I might “end up under a bridge” (an insult to anyone actually at risk of this), I’ve always insisted — contradicting myself — that being fulfilled really only means you have an answer to the question: “So what do you do?” Then a man approaches forty, and another axis is added on, one of duration, of accumulation: Have I done enough? To provide convincing answers for strangers, I (the snob) worked hard.
• Faced with the problem of social identity, the same man can seem cynical, then noble, then fragile and lost.
• I learned this from Daniela, whose love for her oldest son was so intense, I got the feeling, watching them when the three of us were alone, that I was a private witness to the force that drove the world.
• But if she doesn’t save or damn someone, what does a woman do on a page written by a man?
• That invisible place, where everything is within my control, is orange, and whenever life first appears in that orange shade, it dies.
• Being forty meant only two things: not getting worked up when you’re judged; and for the first time, feeling aches and pains and knowing they’re only going to get worse.

Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed

• Inexplicable sorrows await all of us. Life isn’t some narcissistic game you play online. it all matters — every sin, every regret, every affliction.
• America is dying of loneliness. we, as a people, have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives — those fountains of inconvenient feeling — and toward the frantic enticements of what our friends in the Greed Business call the Free Market.
• She understands that attention is the first and final act of love, and that the ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn’t cheap oil or potable water or even common sense, but mercy.
• She offers what we wish every mother would: enough compassion to make us feel safe within our broken need, and enough wisdom to hold on to hope.
• We are obligated to the people we care about and who we allow to care about us, whether we say we love them or not. Our main obligation is to be forthright — to elucidate the nature of our affection when such elucidation would be meaningful or clarifying.
• She had to count the years and let them roll by, to grow up and then run as far as she could in the direction of her best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by her own desire to heal.
• Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.
• Transformation often demands that we separate our emotional responses from our rational minds.
• The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that.
• Do not reach the era of child-rearing and real jobs with a guitar case full of crushing regret for all the things you wished you’d done in your youth.
• And in the meanwhile, cultivate an understanding of a bunch of the other things that the best, sanest people on the planet know: that life is long, that people both change and remain the same, that every last one of us will need to fuck up and be forgiven, that we’re all just walking and walking and walking and trying to find our way, that all roads lead eventually to the mountaintop.
• Most parents are alternately blissed out by their love for their children and utterly overwhelmed by the spectacular amount of sacrifice they require.
• You’re going to be all right, because all right is almost always where we eventually land, even if we fuck up entirely along the way.
• You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that’s all.
• Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.
• Countless people have been devastated for reasons that cannot be explained or justified in spiritual terms. To do as you are doing in asking If there were a God, why would he let my little girl have to have possibly life-threatening surgery? — understandable as that question is — creates a false hierarchy of the blessed and the damned. To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not God exists constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for true compassion. It implies a pious quid pro quo that defies history, reality, ethics, and reason. It fails to acknowledge that the other half of rising — the very half that makes rising necessary — is having first been nailed to the cross.
• Go, even though your friends will be disappointed or surprised or pissed off or all three. Go, even though you once said you would stay. Go, even though you’re afraid of being alone. Go, even though you’re sure no one will ever love you as well as he does. Go, even though there is nowhere to go. Go, even though you don’t know exactly why you can’t stay. Go, because you want to. Because wanting to leave is enough. Get a pen. Write that last sentence on your palm — all three of you. Then read it over and over again until your tears have washed it away. Doing what one wants to do because one wants to do it is hard for a lot of people, but I think it’s particularly hard for women. We are, after all, the gender onto which a giant Here to Serve button has been eternally pinned. We’re expected to nurture and give by the very virtue of our femaleness, to consider other people’s feelings and needs before our own. I’m not opposed to those traits. The people I most admire are in fact nurturing and generous and considerate. Certainly, an ethical and evolved life entails a whole lot of doing things one doesn’t particularly want to do and not doing things one very much does, regardless of gender. But an ethical and evolved life also entails telling the truth about oneself and living out that truth. Leaving a relationship because you want to doesn’t exempt you from your obligation to be a decent human being. You can leave and still be a compassionate friend to your partner. Leaving because you want to doesn’t mean you pack your bags the moment there’s strife or struggle or uncertainty. It means that if you yearn to be free of a particular relationship ship and you feel that yearning lodged within you more firmly than any other competing and contrary yearnings are lodged, your desire to leave is not only valid, but probably the right thing to do. even if someone you love is hurt by that. You are not a terrible person for wanting to break up with someone you love. You don’t need a reason to leave. Wanting to leave is enough. Leaving doesn’t mean you’re incapable of real love or that you’ll never love anyone else again. It doesn’t mean you’re morally bankrupt or psychologically demented, or a nymphomaniac. It means you wish to change the terms of one particular relationship. That’s all. be brave enough to break your own heart.
• I’d silently send my love to them across the universe in the way people have sent their love across the universe to the people they love throughout all time, and I would know in my heart that they had received it.
• The useless days will add up to something. the shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people's diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.
• But as you are surely aware, forgiveness doesn’t mean you let the forgiven stomp all over you once again. Forgiveness means you’ve found a way forward that acknowledges harm done and hurt caused without letting either your anger or your pain rule your life or define your relationship with the one who did you wrong.
• There is no why. You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding.
• What do you do when you don’t know what to do about something? I talk to Mr. Sugar and my friends. I make lists. I attempt to analyze the situation from the perspective of my “best self” — the one that’s generous, reasonable, forgiving, loving, bighearted, and grateful. I think really hard about what I’ll wish I did a year from now. I map out the consequences of the various actions I could take. I ask what my motivations are, what my desires are, what my fears are, what I have to lose, and what I have to gain.
• I move toward the light, even if it’s a hard direction in which to move. I trust myself. I keep the faith. I mess up sometimes.
• Which happens to be precisely what Cary Grant did, He wasn’t born a suave and bedazzling movie star. He wasn’t even born Cary Grant. He was a lonely kid whose depressed mother was sent to a madhouse without his know-edge when he was nine or ten. His father told him she’d gone on an extended vacation. He didn’t know what became of her until he was well into his thirties, when he discovered her still institutionalized, but alive. He was kicked out of school in England at fourteen and by sixteen he was traveling across the United States, performing as a stilt-walker and acrobat and mime. Eventually he found his calling as an actor and changed his name to the one we know him by the name your counselor invoked because it’s synonymous with male charisma and charm and fabulousness, but he was always still that boy inside. Of himself Grant said, “I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be and I finally became that person. Or he became me. Or we met at some point.”
• It has never before occurred to me that I thought in order to get a man to love me I had to appear to be broken for him. and yet when he said it, I recognized it — immediately, humiliatingly — as true. I didn’t have to be broken for him, even thought parts of me were. I could be every piece of myself and he’d loved me still. My appeal did not rely on my weakness or my need. It relied on everything I was and wanted to be.
• There is a transformative power in seeing the familiar from a new, distant perspective.
• The narratives we create in order to justify our actions and choices become in so many ways who we are. They are the things we say back to ourselves to explain our complicated lives. Perhaps the reason you’ve not yet been able to forgive yourself is that you’re still invested in your self-loathing.

Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart

• Alcohol is the gift of any narration, and any writer thrills to the thwop of a corkscrew being pulled. Now the protagonists will reveal themselves. Now there will be unchecked laughter and love. Now the principals will flirt and be cruelly rebuffed, and the loveless will sigh into their cups and try to remember what it was like to be wanted.
• But he had to think like a character in a Chekhov play, forever taunted by desires, but trapped in a life much too small to accommodate the entirety of a human being.
• The older I get, the more I delight in people who orbit parallel to me but remain always out of reach.
• He had once again forgotten a cardinal rule: that a person living beneath an eternally blue sky could find comfort in the gray landscape of others. As long as there was wheatgrass and yoga somewhere in the world, everything and everyone was “lovely.”
• He wished he could fall in love with someone as his wife evidently had done. He had chased after beauty for such a long part of his life, until he had caught up with it and found it, like everything else, worthy of no more than a chapter or two of heightened prose.
• He felt himself slackening with the onslaught of unexplained love, extricating himself from the place of often useful sadness that he used as a placeholder for love.
• “You fall in love with yourself first. With who you want to be when interacting with the person you think you’re in love with. Sorry, my English not so good. I hope you can understand NBA Future Super-star.” She didn’t laugh. “Go on,” she said. “Then maybe, if you loosen up a little, you fall in love with what the other person really is, but primarily you still love them because of how they enhance you. Now you just have all these backup reasons to love them.”
• Look how old we are, they were both thinking. They had spent so much of their lives boarding buses and watching the figure of the other recede in the dust.
• Maybe she still hoarded feelings for him in the old-fashioned sequined purse she called her heart.

Essays in Love by Alain de Botton

• ‘Seeing through people is so easy, and it gets you nowhere,’ remarked Elias Canetti, suggesting how effortlessly and yet how uselessly we can find fault with others.
• Do we not fall in love partly out of a momentary will to suspend seeing through people, even at the cost of blinding ourselves a little in the process? If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone? Is there not in every coup de foudre a certain wilful exaggeration of the qualities of the beloved, an exaggeration which distracts us from our habitual pessimism and focuses our energies on someone in whom we can believe in a way we have never believed in ourselves?
• Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won’t find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity.
• The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once (we soon feel ungrateful) or those who never allow us to kiss them (we soon forget them), but those who know how carefully to administer varied doses of hope and despair.
• Albert Camus suggested that we fall into love with people because, from the outside, they look so whole, physically whole and emotionally ‘together’ — when subjectively, we feel dispersed and confused. We would not love if there no lack within us, but we are offended by the discovery of a similar lack in the other. Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.
• We base our fall into love upon insufficient material, and supplement our ignorance with desire.
• I was forced to add to my understanding of Chloe a whole section that had unfolded prior to my arrival, my vision of her colliding with that imposed by the initial family narrative.
• Politics seems an incongruous field to link to love, but can we not read, in the bloodstained histories of the French, Fascist, or Communist revolutions, something of the same coercive structure, the same impatience with diverging views fuelled by passionate ideals? Amorous politics begins its infamous history with the French Revolution, when it was first proposed (with all the choice of a rape) that the state would not just govern but also love its citizens, who would respond likewise or face the guillotine. The beginning of revolutions is psychologically strikingly akin to that of certain relationships: the stress on unity, the sense of omnipotence, the desire to eliminate secrets (with the fear of the opposite soon leading to lover’s paranoia and the creation of a secret police).
• I took pride in finding Chloe more beautiful than a Platonist would have done. The most interesting faces generally oscillate between charm and crookedness. There is a tyranny about perfection, a certain tedium even, something that asserts itself with all the dogmatism of a scientific formula. The more tempting kind of beauty has only a few angles from which it may be seen, and then not in all lights and at all times. It flirts dangerously with ugliness, it takes risks with itself, it does not side comfortably with mathematical rules of proportion, it draws its appeal from precisely those details that also lend themselves to ugliness.
• As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination.
• A subjective theory of beauty makes the observer wonderfully indispensable.
• Love reveals its insanity by its refusal to acknowledge the inherent normality of the loved one.
• Lovers cannot remain philosophers for long, they should give way to the religious impulse, which is to believe and have faith, as opposed to the philosophic impulse, which is to doubt and enquire. They should prefer the risk of being wrong and in love to being in doubt and without love.
• Unable to express ourselves honestly in most of our daily interactions, we could between us aerate our lies and atone for the social niceties we had performed.
• What does it mean that man is a ‘social animal’? Only that humans need one another in order to define themselves and achieve self-consciousness, in a way that mollusks or earthworms do not. We cannot come to a proper sense of ourselves if there aren’t others around to show us what we’re like.
• “A man can acquire anything in solitude except a character,” wrote Stendhal, suggesting that character has its genesis in the reactions of others to our words and actions. Our selves are fluid and require the contours provided by our neighbours. To feel whole, we need people in the vicinity who know us as well, sometimes better, than we know ourselves.
• The labeling of others is usually a silent process. Most people do not force us into roles, they merely suggest that we adopt them through their reactions to us, and hence surreptitiously prevent us from moving beyond whatever mold they have assigned us.
• In resolving our need to love, we do not always succeed in resolving our need to long.
• And so the holiday proceeded: anticipation in the morning, anxiety in the actuality, and pleasant memories in the evening.
• The pleasures of depending on someone pale next to the paralyzing fears that such dependence involves.
• At the end of a relationship, it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches.
• I understood the pain of history, a record of carnage enveloped in nauseous nostalgia.
• In calling for a monastic existence free of emotional turmoil, stoicism was simply trying to deny the legitimacy of certain potentially painful yet fundamental human needs. However brave, the stoic was in the end a coward at the point of perhaps the highest reality, at the moment of love.

Modern Love Essays by Various Authors

• For some reason I’ve always been susceptible to thinking my life would be vastly improved by the solution to a single problem. In high school, I thought, It will all get better when the braces come off or when my skin clears up or when I go to college. And now, older and supposedly wiser, I find myself thinking it will all get better when I find romance. When I have a man who wants me despite how fallible, loud, or political I can be. Someone who, with a kiss, can snap me out of my self-pitying reverie. I think about how long I’ve been ready to find the beauty in another human being, to caress the scars of someone as flawed as me and to feel that person reciprocate. That night I hadn’t been looking for romance, but my two-time lover embedded himself in my consciousness when he told me I was the girl of his dreams, and I can’t help but think how cruel that was, considering how it all turned out. Our goodbye was a kiss on the mouth and a wink as he stepped off the subway.
• One of the great pleasures of being shocked by some amazing thing a loved one does is being after-shocked by something in ourselves.
• Making a fool of yourself for love is ultimately about you, about how much you have to give and the distances you will travel to keep your heart wide open when everything around you makes you feel like slamming it shut and soldering it closed.
• That’s probably the beginning of love: when you see someone in a way that defies reality, but which makes perfect sense to you.

Bye Bye Blondie by Virginie Despentes

• The nicest people are always the only ones who ever apologize for being annoying.
• She appreciated the effectiveness and economy of expression: in two seconds, he’d made her feel really stupid.
• It takes time for critical events to register, developing like a plant in the soul, bearing their fruit and declaring themselves part of reality.
• But it was astonishing — both tempting and terrifying — to be loved precisely for what she was most afraid of in herself.
• It was really stupid the way they loved each other, without ever understanding or doing the right thing at the right time.

The Defining Decade by Meg Jay

• Goals direct us from the inside, but shoulds are paralyzing judgments from the outside. Goals feel like authentic dreams while shoulds feel like oppressive obligations.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

• A thousand reasons why it might have happened but none as important as the fact that it had.
• But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.
• She was the kind of girlfriend god gives you young, so you’ll know loss for the rest of your life.
• It’s never the changes we want that change everything.

Heartburn by Nora Ephron

• Infidelity doesn’t work. You have only a certain amount of energy, and when you spread it around, everything gets confused, and the first thing you know, you can’t remember which one you’ve told which story to, and the next thing you know, you’re moaning, “oh, Morty, Morty, Morty,” when what you mean is “oh, Sidney, Sidney, Sidney,” and the next thing you know, you think you’re in love with both of them simply because you’ve been raised to believe that the only polite response to the words “I love you” is “I love you too,” and the next thing you know, you think you’re in love with only one of them, because you’re too guilty to handle loving them both back.
• He accused me of the thing men think is the most insulting thing they can accuse you of — wanting to be married.
• You fall in love with someone, and part of what you love about him are the differences between you; and then you get married and the differences start to drive you crazy. You fall in love with someone and you say to yourself, oh, well, I never really cared about politics, bridge, french, and tennis; and then you get married and it starts to drive you crazy that you’re married to someone who doesn’t even know who’s running for president.
• It seems to me that the fundamental and primal desire to get married is followed almost immediately by an equally fundamental and primal urge to be single again.
• It’s hard when you don’t like someone a friend marries. First of all, it means you pretty much have to confine your friendship to lunch, and I hate lunch. second of all, it means that even a simple flat inquiry like “How’s Helen?” is taken amiss, since your friend always thinks that what you hope he’s going to say is “dead.” You feel irritated because your darling friend has married beneath himself, and he feels irritated because you don’t see the virtues of his beloved. Then, if the marriage fails, he becomes even more irritated at you, because if you had been a real friend, you would have prevented him physically from making the mistake, you would have locked him up in a closet until the urge to get married had passed.
• That’s the catch about betrayal, of course: that it feels good, that there’s something immensely pleasurable about moving from a complicated relationship which involves minor atrocities on both sides to a nice, neat, simple one where one person has done something so horrible and unforgivable that the other person is immediately absolved of all the low-grade sins of sloth, envy, gluttony, avarice, and I forget the other three.
• Sometimes I believe that sex plus guilt equals love, and sometimes I believe that sex plus guilt equals good sex. sometimes I believe that love is as natural as the tides, and sometimes I believe that love is an act of will. Sometimes I believe that some people are better at love than others, and sometimes I believe that everyone is faking it. Sometimes I believe that love is essential, and sometimes I believe that the only reason love is essential is that otherwise you spend all your time looking for it.
• To the extent that he was at all political, it lay in his understanding that in a socialist country you can get rich by providing necessities, while in a capitalist country you can get rich by providing luxuries.
• And then the dream breaks into a tiny million pieces. The dream dies. Which leaves you with a choice: you can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.

Pure Colour by Sheila Heti

• She felt so alone in those days. Not that she minded. It is only when you get older that everyone makes you feel bad about being alone, or implies that spending time with other people is somehow better, because it proves you to be likeable. But being unlikeable wasn’t the reason she was alone. She was alone so she could hear herself thinking. She was alone so she could hear herself living.
• What do humans go to art for, but to locate within themselves that inward-turning eye, which breathes insignificance into all of existence — for what is art but the act of infusing matter with the breath of god?
• An artist knows himself to be an artist because of how he relates to his own sincerity.
• Our lack of awareness of the scope of the world kept us from any great falseness. It was enough to know just four or five people, and to have slept with two or three of them. Was there anything else to be ambitious for? Just an imagined immortality — a sense of one’s own greatness, which could in no way be tested.
• What were the words that came into her mind, as she lay with him in the darkness of his final days? For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
• Perhaps we can only give in total beauty and simplicity in the moment of our dying, because that is the only giving that demands no return. Once you are dead, you can no longer accept a return, but in life there is always the hope of being given in return. Her father had wanted to give to her in life the same way he had given to her in death, so completely unselfishly. And he had, he had. And he hadn’t, he hadn’t.
• She wanted to remain there beside him for weeks and months. In those days, she abandoned all other people, and all the things that had mattered to her. She believed they never would matter again. All she was called to do was to lie there beside him, and it was the most important thing. She was just a body beside a body. During his life, doing this hadn’t felt like an important thing. How had she missed the truth?
• That winter, walking through her neighbourhood, she saw the little red, green, white, blue, purple and yellow Christmas lights, which dotted the porches and were strung across the trees in the front yards of most of her neighbours. They shimmered like the most beautiful stars, just giving off their humble light, their cords curled and mangled, their plastic — obvious but they shimmered like the souls of a million long-dead people. That humans felt like adorning a tree with lights at Christmastime made her think that an intuition of some other realm wasn’t completely gone from us; that humans still felt something, that there was still something to honour. People wanted to lift themselves up and lift up their neighbours with these silly little adornments-which to her, the winter her father died, meant so much. She walked through her neighbourhood, choked up with gratitude over all those tiny shining souls that adorned the trees and the falling-down porches. Humans knew! They remembered! These lights spoke to our knowledge of another world, the world behind this world, the world of the spirit. Nobody was thinking it, but they knew it, nonetheless. Humans hadn’t lost what was most beautiful; our very small and tentative sense of the hidden, magnificent, divine. No one said it, but buried in their hearts, there it was. These little lights, strung across all the trees, proved it. We knew so little about who we were, or what we were doing here, but this little gesture spoke so gently of our not-knowing, our hope, our sense of connection to something universally shared — which was our not-knowing, so magnificent and dizzyingly deep. It was her most reliable comfort in those winter months, when her heart was bare. It was the only thing that warmed her. I always found them cheap, a woman at a party said.
• Yes, of course, she replied. I did, too. But she wanted to explain that she finally understood them, and saw through their cheapness to their deeper beauty. But how could she say what she meant? That people had placed these bright, sparkling, colour-ful souls everywhere, on every tree and on every doorstep; they reassured her that people knew that all around us, in the air and in the trees, were the colourful, sparkling souls of the dead. These bright and twinkling spots of light shining out from the darkness were all of their ancestors, now her own father, and all the people who had ever been born and died. We strung these symbols of them across our own houses in our knowledge of their living and dying, relieved to have them twinkling near, with us here forever.
• When Mira thought about home, her main thought was about her father, and about how he wanted her near. He encouraged her to go out in the world, but he would have rather she stayed at home with him. She always felt his presence, calling her to return, and she could never separate any of her actions from the pleasure or the pain she feared it would cause him-her total suspicion of which way it would go. In her childhood, everything between them had been golden and green: he was always pointing out the beauty of the world to her, its greatness and its mystery, and his attention had made her feel cherished and loved.
• And there’s macrophages and things within the body that make their own decisions, and they can make the decisions it shut you down. Right, there’s a kind of vanity to thinking you’re the only decider, or that making good decisions will keep you alive, because your cells are making decisions, too.
• Mira had spent so much of the second half of her life thinking about people from the first half — her father and Annie — who she felt she never should have abandoned. Yet none of the jewels that had sparkled back then had she been able to draw with her down through time. She couldn’t let it go! What were one’s middle years — with its laziness and perspective- for, besides sweeping up the glittering jewels of the past, and gathering them near to one now? She could see so clearly what had been the jewels. They sparkled so brightly against the dark night of her history, no way to deny them.
• That we are made to die, here in the first draft of existence — that is the pain and the longing. That is the beautiful.
• The probability of any person being around is one in a trillion, so it’s almost a zero percent chance of you being here. But you’re going to have, you know, eight billion people, and those eight billion people have won the lottery. And the worst part is nobody realizes that! They don’t realize what a rare opportunity they have to observe this universe, because here’s this amazing universe, and if humans hadn’t evolved to this stage, they wouldn’t know they were living in this beautiful place.
• You were very loving to me, and I only remember the loving parts of you now. That is true when someone dies — that you often only think about the loving part, but in that way you are just thinking about life, which runs through plants and trees; the loving part which is part of everything. That part of us is the best thing about us, and because it is the least individual thing, it shines through us so beautifully, when it shines. It is easy to remember that part, which is equivalent with life, when the person you love is dead. The winning parts are equivalent with death. You only remember the loving parts, which are life, in order to bring me back to life. When you remember the criticizing and killing parts, you are not as sad about my death. That was my death in life, too. It is not a mistake to remember this. It is not bad to remember the parts of my life that were death. But it is better and easier to remember the parts that were life, because while the winning and critiquing part dies, the loving part goes somewhere else; it still remains somewhere. How beautifully love lights up the person in life! How love truly illuminates us! Yes, and whatever illuminated them is somewhere else now, illuminating something else. When you remember me in a loving way, it is the thing that illuminates everything on earth that is shining through your memories. So why don’t you focus on the memories that make you happy, the beautiful ones, for that recalls the light which shone through me, and which is the same as the light that shines through you.
• I would like to come back after my death and see- What? Whether my works were kept by humanity. Whether my art is being exhibited fifty, seventy-five, a hundred years from now. So you want to return to earth to google yourself? Yes. Immortality means googling yourself forever.
• Passing by an open garbage can, Mira looked inside it. Against the side of a clear plastic bag, she noticed a few bottles of caffeine pills. Mira knew what this meant. People complained of being tired, exhaustion, not realizing that this was put in them so they wouldn’t do as many things. Such people railed against their fatigue — the ones who were determined to fix things. In order to stop them, the gods tired them out. The weariest people are being the most prevented. They are the most dangerous ones, who would change the world if they could. We know which people are threatening to the gods by how exhausted they feel all the time. Those who would not make as many fixes are not given as much fatigue. You know the gods consider you dangerous if you are tired all the time.

Ghost Lover by Lisa Taddeo

• You remembered the first time you had cracked him. When it went from him making you laugh to him making sure he had made you laugh.
• It was the terrific plight of women who wanted to be remembered, to shack up with men who needed to forget it all.
• 5pm. Pre-dusk late summer Manhattan. Pink like San Diego, blue and swan cream like Paris. Holy if you’re happy.
• She had always known, of course, that whereas old women for the most part grew into their age gracefully, abandoned the frissons of youth, old men more firmly clawed into the bedrock of their power, their money. If they had none, they hated the world. Hipsters. Bitcoin. If they had plenty, they were afraid of everyone trying to steal it. If they had a stepdaughter, then that was the only time they were afraid of women.
• I can’t believe I survived. So much of life is like that. How did we get by? we think. And yet when we look back on the past, mostly we see happiness.
• She’d been biding her time, waiting out the slew of whores who had followed the divorce, waiting for him to grow tired, as she knew he would, of the young students with their black eyes and dumb theories, of the barmaids and their ignorant lust, of the worshipful and the indifferent, of all the wrong women who were not Noni, who did not understand him, who were not his equals, who couldn’t look over his work and make deft suggestions for improvement while coherently praising his inimitable style.
• Phillip saw Margherita walk in with one of her hot friends. His eyes, briefly, swam. She would be fine, he knew; she would marry a personal chef and one random Tuesday in the future when they reunited Big Sur he would tell her the truth, that he’d loved her best. With an IPA in his hand, he would explain to her about men, who needed to accomplish something in outer space in order to exist.

Tell Me Lies by Carola Lovering

• Kathleen’s theory was extremely typical. She thought she was happy working in consulting, but in reality, her happiness was constructed based on the life she’d built around that job. Did she stroll to work each morning with passion and hunger and dynamite firing up inside her bones? Hell no. Kathleen probably sat at her desk every day and, like most people in the world, waited for it to end. It’s always boggled my mind the way the majority of individuals sit around waiting for the next event, then the next- subconsciously waiting for life to end. Kathleen would get off work and march off to some spin class where she’d sweat for an hour, probably enjoying it much less than she’d admit. After spinning she’d trod on home, where she’d make dinner and drink wine with Luke, and that was why she believed she was happy-the day’s result, that two- to three-hour period when she could relax and spend time with her fiancé was, in her diluted mind, worth the insipid sludge of the rest of her life. Kathleen should’ve been a teacher, if that was her real ambition. Or maybe she has no ambition, which is the reality for a lot of people. Alice included, as far as I can tell. Now, they no longer went away — there was not, at least for most of them, a sea to roam or a desert to cross, there was nothing but the floors of an office tower, the morning commute, a familiar and monotonous landscape, in which life became something secondhand, not something a man could own for himself. It was only on the shores of infidelity that they achieved a little privacy, a little inner life, it was only in the domain of their faithlessness that they became, once again, strangers to their wives, capable of anything.
• It’s easy to find the emotional themes of a person's life in the convictions they hold most blindly.

A Separation by Katie Kitamura

• Betrayal always puts one partner in the position of knowing, and leaves the other in the dark.
• Now, they no longer went away — there was not, at least for most of them, a sea to roam or a desert to cross, there was nothing but the floors of an office tower, the morning commute, a familiar and monotonous landscape, in which life became something secondhand, not something a man could own for himself. It was only on the shores of infidelity that they achieved a little privacy, a little inner life, it was only in the domain of their faithlessness that they became, once again, strangers to their wives, capable of anything.
• He was always running away before he was running toward anything.
• Every romance requires a backdrop and an audience, even — or perhaps especially — the genuine ones, romance is not something that a couple can be expected to conjure by themselves, you and another, the two of you together, not just once but again and again, love, in general, is fortified by its context, nourished by the gaze of others.
• It was a terrible thing, to love and not know whether you were loved in return, it led to the worst sensations — jealousy, rage, self-loathing — to all these lesser states.
• But he was drawn to people who were in a state of loss. This gave people the mistaken impression that he was a sympathetic man. His sympathy lasted as long as his curiosity, once that had gone he suddenly withdrew, making himself unavailable, or at least less available than people might reasonably have expected, given the sudden and violent intimacy he had forced upon them in the first place.
• The progress of a relationship, for good or bad, can always be described through the accumulation of the disbanding of rights.
• As my life with Christopher began to recede into the past, everything that I learned about him — a meaningless detail from his new life, a revelation from his past one — was a source of potential discomfort, causing a pang of greater or lesser pain, or even occasional indifference. This was the process by which two lives were disentangled, eventually, the dread and discomfort would fade and be replaced by unbroken indifference, I would see him in the street by chance, and it would be like seeing an old photograph of yourself: you recognize the image but are unable to remember quite what it was to be that person.
• It was one of the quandaries a woman sometimes faces, not just a woman, but all of us: she entrances one man without effort, a man who is undesired, who follows her around like a dog, however much he is whipped or abused, while all her efforts to attract and then ensnare another man, the truly desired man, come to naught. Charm is not universal, desire is too often unreciprocated, or gathers and pools in the wrong places, slowly becoming toxic.
• Imagination, after all, costs nothing, it’s the living that is the harder part.

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

• The difference between a civilized man and a barbarous fiend — a madman, say — lies, perhaps, merely in a thin veneer of willed self-restraint.

Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley

• But I didn’t want there to be any silences, out of which raw truths might tumble.
• I think that sexuality itself was sometimes understood, by the women in my family, as a kind of violence that must be submitted to, buried deep in the privacy of domestic life.
• That’s all tyranny is: it’s not in a personality, it’s in a set of circumstances. It’s being trapped with your enemy in a limited space — a country, or a family — where the balance of power between you is unequal, and the weaker one has no recourse.
• It’s surprising how quickly you can get used to being loved. I had been so abandoned and alone — and then all of a sudden this love was available to wrap around me, warm as a blanket. I got used to the warmth and forgot that I’d ever not had it.
• But something ruthless in me drew back sometimes even from our moments of most tender intimacy. I would think: he’s too simple for me. Then I’d be appalled at myself — it was me who was simple: narrow in my selfish, sticky fascination with my own feelings. I made up to him then with my affection and attention.
• In his mythology women ought to be intuitive and enigmatic and wholesome — a safe place in which the lights of male striving and intellect could heal themselves.
• And I didn’t condemn the ideals of sacrifice, I could see how they would work as a way of getting through the day, dressing drudgery up as a poignant adventure, putting the whole burden of freedom onto the poor men. Some of those novels seemed like nothing less than an extended punishment of their men, who were drunk and heinous and craven in exact proportion to how far their women abased and subordinated themselves.
• It wasn’t robbery or violence I was afraid of — or certainly, those weren’t at the forefront of my mind. But I didn’t want to make a fool of myself, I couldn’t bear the idea of being exposed in my raw, unfinished ignorance. The expression on my face — frowning, spiky, defiant, I mostly think, in those days — was like a mask of closed competence which I wore and dreaded having torn away. I was twenty-five and it didn’t occur to me to use my youth as power, I only felt it as weakness. At least at home I was able to tell myself I was a mother, wrap myself around in all the responsibility and importance of that — although the way women used that importance sometimes felt to me like cheating, an illegitimate shortcut. (Also, I wasn’t sure that I was good at mothering.) If I was free, if I was just me, then what was I? What could I do; what could I become?
• It must have been physical, I suppose. Underneath all the complicated negotiations we still had to get through, all the painful rash precipitations and withdrawals, we’d had a tiny taste already, out on the street, of how it would be to yield to each other, to sink down together into the deep safety of each other’s flesh.
• He was one of those men only expansive on his own spacious ground — displaced onto alien territory he was diminished.
• But what if the novels were right? What if sentimentality was closer to the truth of life and cynicism was the evasion?
• For years I had to keep my cleverness cramped and concealed — not because it was dangerous or forbidden, but because it had no useful function in my daily life. In the wrong contexts, cleverness is just an inhibiting clumsiness.
• How could we two, Mac and I — with our infinite complexities, and our so-divergent experiences, which had hardened into our natures — be forced to fit inside this shared circle of marriage, curled up as tightly together as yin and yang? That’s what marriage is like, I think — this squeezing of two natures into one space that doesn’t fit either of them.
• I have a vision of despairing clarity then, as if my life were a featureless bland landscape stretching behind and ahead of me: all surface, all banal anxiety, and difficulty, unredeemed nowadays by any promise or hidden content. It’s in these early mornings, if I were an Anglican like Mac, that I’d pray.

Writers & Lovers by Lily King

• I look into my eyes, but they aren’t really mine, not the eyes I used to have. They’re the eyes of someone very tired and very sad, and once I see them I feel even sadder and then I see that sadness, that compassion, for the sadness in my eyes, and I see the water rising in them. I’m both the sad person and the person wanting to comfort the sad person. And then I feel sad for that person who has so much compassion because she’s clearly been through the same thing, too. And the cycle keeps repeating. It’s like when you go into a dressing room with a three-paneled mirror and you line them up just right to see the long narrowing hallway of yourselves diminishing into infinity. It feels like that, like I’m sad for an infinite number of my selves.
• It was strong, whatever was between us, thick, like the wet air and the smell of every green thing ready to bloom. Maybe it was just spring. Maybe that’s all it was.
• It’s a particular kind of pleasure, of intimacy, loving a book with someone.
• You get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them. Sometimes you mix the two up in a terrible tangle that’s hard to unravel.
• I think of her in her office in Alexandria, playing the role of a lawyer for so many hours a day. I think of all the people playing roles, getting further and further away from themselves, from what moves them, what stirs them all up inside.
• You don’t realize how much effort you’ve put into covering things up until you try to dig them out.
• It’s always a choice between fireworks and coffee in bed.
• I hate male cowardice and the way they always have each other’s backs. They have no control. They justify everything their dicks make them do. And they get away with it. Nearly every time.

All Adults Here by Emma Straub

• She didn’t understand what made something cool, but she did understand that calling something cool immediately undid whatever magic had been at work.
• So much of becoming an adult was distancing yourself from your childhood experiences and pretending they didn’t matter, then growing to realize they were all that mattered and composed 90% of your entire being.
• People always said that life is long, but really they meant their own memories.
• That was the very worst part of being an adult, understanding that there was no fairness in the world, no unseen hand on the ouija board. There was only the internet and the paths you chose for whatever stupid reason that seemed right at the time, when you had one extra drink at a party, or were feeling lonely at the exact moment that someone else was too. And wasn’t everyone, always?

This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz

• And that’s when I know it’s over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it’s the end.

How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

• Life gifts easy peace only to the very young and the very old.
• A man’s anger is often no more than a safe haven for his cowardice.
• Flickers of progress are brightening lives in isolated corners of the world, yes, but a universal solution eludes us.
• This pain I’m feeling at your leaving, I want to channel it into love. I want to love and love and love, no conditions. I could be dead before you get on the plane, I could die tonight. I don’t mean to be macabre, I’m just trying to learn how to hold on to nothing in life. My entire life has been a game of holding on tightly and wanting to never let go and yet losing. It’s painful…. My mother, today is the anniversary of her death. If my mother were here today, he said, she would tell you to just love, and be kind to everyone. That’s what she used to say to me every day, and I saw her practicing it. I saw how she smiled at everyone. She smiled even when the weather was cold. She smiled when people in stores stared at her because she didn’t look and talk like them. When her time came, she died with a smile on her face. These past years, the world has tried to tell me that there’s a better way to live; I should act on my pain because people like my mother are misguided. The world is wrong.
• He said to me: You’re dying too, princess. We’re all dying. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it all week, how close death is. Doesn’t it make you want to change the way you live? It makes me want to. I want to float through life, untethered from human vanities. It’s unbelievable, you know, what a blip our existence is in the infinite expanse of the universe. It’s baffling, so humbling, and liberating, don’t you think? We don’t even matter. You know what I’m realizing? Living is painful. That’s why we so often forget that we’re dying, we’re too busy catering to our pains. I think it’s one of nature’s tricks — it needs us to not dwell on the fact that we’re dying, otherwise, we’d spend our days eating low-hanging fruits from trees and splashing around in clear rivers and laughing while our pointless lives pass us by. Nature makes sure that pain awaits us at every turn so that in our eternal quest to avoid it, or rid ourselves of it, we’ll keep on wanting one thing after another and the earth will stay vibrant. We feel pain, we cause pain, a ridiculous endless cycle. All the misery we cause others, what is it but a result of us dumping our pain on them?

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

• When there is an emptiness, the mind will obligingly fill it up. Fear is always at hand to supply any vacancies, as is curiosity. I have had ample experience with both.

Five Tuesdays in Winter by Lily King

• It was a skill of mine, splitting myself in half, pretending to be childish and oblivious while sifting through adult exchanges with the focus and discrimination of a forensic detective.
• There was no reason why anything would be different, why he would be able to make anyone happier now. He was the same person. He’d always been the same person. He marveled at how in books people look back fondly to remembered selves as if they were lost acquaintances. But he’d never been anything but this oneself. Perhaps it was because physically there’d been little change; he’d lost no hair, gained no weight, grown no beard. He’d read a great deal in the past twenty years but nothing that threatened his view of the world or his own minuscule place within it.
• On the way back to Vermont I thought about words and how, if you put a few of them in the right order, a three-minute story about a girl and her dog can get people to forget all the ways you’ve disappointed them.
• They were always excited by a fresh drink, but all the alcohol seemed to do to either of her parents was uncover how little they liked life or anything in it.
• Monotony, especially the unfamiliar monotony of being loved, was something she couldn’t seem to get comfortable with.

Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson

• I thought of the many ways we’ve legalized vengeful and cruel punishments, how we’ve allowed our victimization to justify the victimization of others. We’ve submitted to the harsh instinct to crush those among us whose brokenness is most visible. But simply punishing the broken — walking away from them or hiding them from sight — only ensured that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity.
• The accumulated insults and indignations caused by racial presumptions are destructive in ways that are hard to measure. Constantly being suspected, accused, watched, doubted, distrusted, presumed guilty, and even feared is a burden borne by people of color without a deeper conversation about our history of racial injustice.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

• The moon is a stone and the sky is full of deadly hardware, but oh god, how beautiful anyway.
• Falling in love. Falling into it, we all did then, one way or another. How could he have made such light of it? Sneered even. As if it was trivial for us, a frill, a whim. It was, on the contrary, heavy going. It was the central thing; it was the way you understood yourself; if it never happened to you, not ever, you would be like a mutant, a creature from outer space. Everyone knew that. Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh. And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterward, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time. There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this. Or sometimes, even when you were still loving, still falling, you’d wake up in the middle of the night, when the moonlight was coming through the window onto his sleeping face, making the shadow in the sockets of his eyes darker and more cavernous than in daytime, and you’d think, Who knows what they do, on their own or with other men? Who knows what they say or where they are likely to go? Who can tell what they really are? Under their daily-ness. Likely you would think at those times: What if he doesn’t love me? Or you’d remember stories you’d read, in the newspapers, about women who had been found — often women but sometimes they would be men, or children, that was the worst — in ditches or forests or refrigerators in abandoned rented rooms, with their clothes on or off, sexually abused or not; at any rate killed. There were places you didn’t want to walk, precautions you took that had to do with locks on windows and doors, drawing the curtains, leaving on lights. These things you did were like prayers; you did them and you hoped they would save you. And for the most part they did. Or something did; you could tell by the fact that you were still alive. But all of that was pertinent only in the night, and had nothing to do with the man you loved, at least in daylight. With that man you wanted it to work, to work out. Working out was also something you did to keep your body in shape, for the man. If you worked out enough, maybe the man would too. Maybe you would be able to work it out together, as if the two of you were a puzzle that could be solved; otherwise, one of you, most likely the man, would go wandering off on a trajectory of his own, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with bad withdrawal, which you could counteract by exercise. If you didn’t work it out it was because one of you had the wrong attitude. Everything that went on in your life was thought to be due to some positive or negative power emanating from inside your head. If you don’t like it, change it, we said, to each other and to ourselves. And so we would change the man, for another one. Change, we were sure, was for the better always. We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.
• As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.

Before She Disappeared by Lisa Gardner

• I think of this often, drifting from community to community, always being the stranger and never the neighbor. People all over really are the same. They want to fall in love. They’re glad to survive each day. They pray their children will have a better life than they did. These truths bind us.
• Funny, the things you can grow up not wanting, then suddenly crave with single-minded obsession. Funnier still, the things you can end up having only to realize you’d been right the first time.

The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave

• He never understood that I wasn’t scared of someone leaving me. I was scared the wrong person would stay.

Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion

• Make a place available to the eyes, and in certain ways it is no longer available to the imagination.
• In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions — with the whole manner of intimidating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating — but there’s no getting around the fact that setting aires in paper is the tacit of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writers sensibility on the readers most private space.
• And of course none of it matters very much at all, none of these early successes, early failures. I wonder if we had better not find some way to let our children know this, some way to let them work through their own rejections and sullen rebellions and interludes with golf pros, unassisted by anxious prompting from the wings. Finding one’s role at seventeen is problem enough, without being handed someone else’s script.
• The very grammar of a Hemingway sentence dictated, or was dictated by, a certain way of looking at the world, a way of looking but not joining, a way of moving through but not attaching, a kind of romantic individualism distinctly adapted to its time and source.

My Body by Emily Ratajowski

• I suppose this is the life cycle of a muse: get discovered, be immortalized in art for which you’re never paid, and die in obscurity.
• How funny that men view the life cycles of women so simply! From sex object to mother to what? Invisibility?
• I want more for myself. I will proclaim all of my mistakes and contradictions, for all the women who cannot do so, for all the women we’ve called muses without learning their names, whose silence we mistook for consent. I stood on their shoulders to get here.
• No one likes an angry woman. She is the worst kind of villain: a witch, obnoxious and ugly and full of spite and bitterness. Shrill. I do anything to avoid that feeling, anything to stop myself from being that woman. I try to make anything resembling anger seem spunky and charming and sexy. I fold it into something small, tuck it away. I invoke my most reliable trick — I project sadness — something vulnerable and tender, something welcoming, a thing to be tended to.
• I read once that women are more likely than men to cry when they are angry. I know that women cry out of shame. We are afraid of our anger, embarrassed by the way it transforms us. We cry to quell what we feel, even when it’s trying to tell us something, even when it has every right to exist.
• Men never notice the overcalculating that women do. They think things happen “for some weird reason” while women sing songs and do backbends and dance elaborate moves to make those things happen. You started talking about your career. You told me you used to shoot for Playboy and that your new magazine, while full of nude girls, was “nothing like it.” You got excited when I said I’d been an art major. How surprising it must have been for you to discover that I was, to use your words, “actually a really smart girl.” A mere mention of a pretentious film — it was so easy to subvert your expectations. I wonder how many women you’ve disregarded in your life, written off, because you assumed they had nothing to offer beyond the way they looked. How quickly they learned that the stuff in their heads was of less value than the shape of their bodies. I bet they were all smarter than you.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

• I don’t know why solitude would be a balm for loneliness, but that is how it always was for me in those days.
• But how deeply I regret any sadness you have suffered and how grateful I am in anticipation of any good you have enjoyed.
• And I would think back on conversations I had had in a similar way, really. A great part of my work has been listening to people, in that particular intense privacy of confession, or at least unburdening, and it has been very interesting to me. Not that I thought of these conversations as if they were a contest, I don’t mean that. But as you might look at a game more abstractly — where is the strength, what is the strategy? As if you had no interest in it except in seeing how well the two sides bring each other along, how much they can require of each other, how the life that is the real subject of it all is manifest in it. By “life” I mean something like “energy” (as the scientists use the word) or “vitality,” and also something very different. When people come to speak to me, whatever they say, I am struck by a kind of incandescence in them, the “I” whose predicate can be “love” or “fear” or “want,” and whose object can be “someone” or “nothing” and it won’t really matter, because the loveliness is just in that presence, shaped around “I” like a flame on a wick, emanating itself in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else. But quick, and avid, and resourceful. To see this aspect of life is a privilege of the ministry which is seldom mentioned.
• The twinkling of an eye. That is the most wonderful expression. I’ve thought from time to time it was the best thing in life, that little incandescence you see in people when the charm of a thing strikes them, or the humor of it. ‘The light of the eyes rejoiceth the heart’ that’s a fact.
• And I’d pray for them. And I’d imagine peace they didn’t expect and couldn’t account for descending on their illness or their quarreling or their dreams.
• There is an absolute disjunction between your love and my deserving.
• This morning the world by moonlight seemed to be an immemorial acquaintance I had always meant to befriend.
• Because nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.
• Love is holy because it is like grace — the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.
• I really can’t tell what’s beautiful anymore. I passed two young fellows on the street the other day. I know who they are, they work at the garage. They’re not churchgoing, either one of them, just decent rascally young fellows who have to be joking all the time, and there they were, propped against the garage wall in the sunshine, lighting up their cigarettes. They’re always so black with grease and so strong with gasoline I don’t know why they don’t catch fire themselves. They were passing remarks back and forth the way they do and laughing that wicked way they have. And it seemed beautiful to me. It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over. Sometimes they really do struggle with it. I see that in church often enough. So I wonder what it is and where it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you’re done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is much more easily spent.

Animal by Lisa Taddeo

• Let me tell you: men love cruelty. It reminds them of every time their fathers or mothers didn’t think they were good enough. Cruelty looks better on a woman than the perfect dress.

Beautiful World, Where Are You? by Sally Rooney

• I’ve been thinking lately about right-wing politics (haven’t we all), and how it is that conservatism (the social force) came to be associated with rapacious market capitalism. The connection is not obvious, at least to me, since markets preserve nothing, but ingest all aspects of an existing social landscape and excrete them, shorn of meaning and memory, as transactions.
• I was in the local shop today, getting something to eat for lunch, when I suddenly had the strangest sensation — a spontaneous awareness of the unlikeliness of this life. I mean, I thought of all the rest of the human population — most of whom live in what you and I would consider abject poverty — who have never seen or entered such a shop. And this, this, is what all their work sustains! This lifestyle, for people like us! All the various brands of soft drinks in plastic bottles and all the prepackaged lunch deals and confectionery in sealed bags and store-baked pastries — this is it, the culmination of all the labour in the world, all the burning of fossil fuels and all the backbreaking work on coffee farms and sugar plantations.
• People think that socialism is sustained by force — the forcible expropriation of property — but I wish they would just admit that capitalism is also sustained by exactly the same force in the opposite direction, the forcible protection of existing property arrangements.
• The only apparent schema is that for every victim group (people born into poor families, women, people of colour) there is an oppressor group (people born into rich families, men, white people). But in this framework, relations between victim and oppressor are not historical so much as theological, in that the victims are transcendently good and the oppressors are personally evil. For this reason, an individual’s membership of a particular identity group is a question of unsurpassed ethical significance, and a great amount of our discourse is devoted to sorting individuals into their proper groups, which is to say, giving them their proper moral reckoning.
• My theory is that human beings lost the instinct for beauty in 1976, when plastics became the most widespread material in existence. You can actually see the change in process if you look at street photography from before and after 1976. I know we have good reason to be sceptical of aesthetic nostalgia, but the fact remains that before the 1970s, people wore durable clothes of wool and cotton, stored drinks in glass bottles, wrapped food produce in paper, and filled their houses with sturdy wooden furniture. Now a majority of objects in our visual environment are made of plastic, the ugliest substance on earth, a material which when dyed does not take on colour but actually exudes colour, in an inimitably ugly way. One thing a government could do with my approval (and there aren’t many) would be to prohibit the production of each and every form of plastic not urgently necessary for the maintenance of human life.
• I hate pretending that the personal vanity of attractive young women is anything other than boring and embarrassing. Mine worst of all.
• So of course in the midst of everything, the state of the world being what it is, humanity on the cusp of extinction, here I am writing another email about sex and friendship. What else is there to live for?
• It makes me wonder whether celebrity culture has sort of metastasized to fill the emptiness left by religion. A sort of malignant growth where the sacred used to be.
• Because when we should have been reorganizing the distribution of the world’s resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it’s the very reason I root for us to survive — because we are so stupid about each other.
• I know you’re scared. And maybe you really meant all those things you said about our friendship, just wanting to be friends, and if you did, I’ll accept that. But I feel maybe it’s possible you said those things, at least in some way, because you wanted me to make the other case. As if I would come out and say no, it’s you or no one. I can’t be happy without you. Or whatever, whatever you wanted me to say. And maybe even when you’re getting angry at Alice, saying that she doesn’t care about you, maybe it’s the same idea. At some level you want her to say, oh but I love you very much, you’re my best friend. But the problem is you seem to be drawn to people who aren’t very good at giving you those responses. If you tell me you don’t want to be with me, I might feel very hurt and humiliated, but I’m not going to start begging and pleading with you. At some level, I actually think you know I won’t. But then you get left with the impression that I don’t love you, or I don’t want you, because you’re not getting this response from me — this response that you basically know you won’t get, because I’m not the type of person who can give it to you.
• And their phone calls, the messages they wrote to one another, their jealousies, the years of looks, suppressed smiles, their dictionary of little touches. All the stories they had told them about each other, about themselves. This much was in their eyes and passed between them.
• When I try to picture for myself what a happy life might look like, the picture hasn’t changed very much since I was a child — a house with flowers and trees around it, and a river nearby, and a room full of books, and someone there to love me, that’s all. Just to make a home there, and to care for my parents when they grow older. Never to move, never to board a plane again, just to live quietly and then be buried in the earth. What else is life for? But even that seems so beyond me that it’s like a dream, completely unrelated to anything in reality.
• All my feelings and experiences were in one sense extremely intense, and in another sense completely trivial, because none of my decisions seemed to have any consequences, and nothing about my life — the job, the apartment, the desires, the love affairs — struck me as permanent. I felt anything was possible, that there were no doors shut behind me, and that out there somewhere, as yet unknown, there were people who would love and admire me and want to make me happy. Maybe that explains in some way the openness I felt toward the world — maybe without knowing it, I was anticipating my future, I was watching for signs. A couple of nights ago, I was getting a taxi home on my own after a book launch. The streets were quiet and dark, and the air was oddly warm and still, and on the quays the office buildings were all lit up inside, and empty, and underneath everything, beneath the surface of everything, I began to feel it all over again — the nearness, the possibility of beauty, like a light radiating softly from behind the visible world, illuminating everything. As soon as I realised what I was feeling, I tried to move toward it in my thoughts, to reach out and handle it, but it only cooled a little or shrank away from me, or slipped off further ahead. The lights in my empty offices had reminded me of something, and I had been thinking about you, trying to imagine your house, I think, and I remembered I’d had an email from you, and at the same time I was thinking of Simon, the mystery of him, and somehow as I looked out the taxi window I started to think about his physical presence in the city, that somewhere inside the city’s structure, standing or sitting, holding his arms one way or another, dressed or undressed, he was present, and Dublin was like an advent calendar concealing him behind one of its million windows, and the quality of air was instilled, the temperature was instilled, with his presence, and with your email, and with this message I was writing back to you in my head even then. The world seemed capable of including these things, and my eyes were capable, my brain was capable of receiving and understanding them. I was tired, it was late, I was sitting half-asleep in the back of a taxi, remembering strangely that wherever I go, you are with me, and so is he, and that as long as you both live the world will be beautiful to me.

Hunger by Roxane Gay

• I don’t know how things got so out of control, or I do. This is my refrain. Losing control of my body was a matter of accretion. I began eating to change my body. I was willful in this. Some boys had destroyed me, and I barely survived it. I knew I wouldn’t be able to endure another such violation, and so I ate because I thought that if my body became repulsive, I could keep men away. Even at that young age, I understood that to be fat was to be undesirable to men, to be beneath their contempt, and I already knew too much about their contempt. This is what girls are taught — that we should be slender and small. We should not take up space. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men, acceptable to society. And most women know this, that we are supposed to disappear, but it’s something that needs to be said loudly, over and over again, so that we can resist surrendering to what is expected of us.
• I had a ferocious imagination. I was a daydreamer and I resented being pulled out of my daydreams to deal with the business of living.
• The older I get the more I understand that life is generally the pursuit of desires.
• He said/she said is why so many victims (or survivors, if you prefer that terminology) don’t come forward. All too often, what “he said” matters more, so we just swallow the truth. We swallow it, and more often than not, that truth turns rancid. It spreads through the body like an infection. It becomes depression or addiction or obsession or some other physical manifestation of the silence of what she would have said, needed to say, couldn’t say. With every day that went by, I hated myself more. I disgusted myself more. I couldn’t get away from him. I couldn’t get away from what those boys did. I could smell them and feel their mouths and their tongues and their hands and their rough bodies and their cruel skin. I couldn’t stop hearing the terrible things they said to me. Their voices were with me, constantly. Hating myself became as natural as breathing.
• Or I am thinking about testimony I’ve heard from other women over the years — women sharing their truths, daring to use their voices to say, “This is what happened to me. This is how I’ve been wronged.” I’ve been thinking about how so much testimony is demanded of women, and still, there are those who doubt our stories. There are those who think we are all lucky girls because we are still, they narrowly assume, alive. I am weary of all our sad stories — not hearing them, but that we have these stories to tell, that there are so many.
• I am not cold. I wasn’t ever cold. My warmth was hidden far away from anything that could bring hurt because I knew I didn’t have the inner scaffolding to endure any more hurt in those protected places. My warmth was hidden until I found the right people with whom to share it, people I could trust — friends from graduate school, friends I met through the writing community when I was first starting out, the people who have always been willing to see and take me exactly as I am. I am not promiscuous with my warmth, but when I share it, my warmth can be as hot as the sun.
• In my more generous moments, I tried to believe the locals were using anger to mask their fear of living in a dying town in a changing world.
• With age comes self-awareness, or something that looks like self-awareness, and so I try to be on the lookout for patterns of behavior, choices I’m making where I’m trying too hard, giving too much, reaching too intently for being right where right is what someone else wants me to be. It’s scary, though, trying to be yourself and hoping yourself is enough. It’s scary believing that you, as you are, could ever be enough. There is an anxiety in being yourself, though. There is the haunting question of “What if?” always lingering. What if who I am will never be enough? What if I will never be right enough for someone?

Happy Hour by Mary Miller

• Soon he will be with this other girl, this young girl he loves, and they’ll get engaged and live in a small apartment where they’ll write their stories and drink their starbucks, dream their big dreams. They’ll do things in the proper order and they’ll be happy. I can see it all so clearly. Don’t mess it up, I want to tell him. Don’t fuck things up because once you start fucking up it’s so hard to stop and there comes a point at which you simply don’t know how to do anything else anymore.
• Nearly every movie, every song and TV show and item of food reminds me of someone and it is a horrible way to live.
• I’ve given up so much to be with him and some of these things are for the best. He has taught me sex without love, a buddhist’s degree of unattachment. He’s taught me that I can only rely on myself and it’s a good lesson, one I need to learn.
• This past Thanksgiving, I couldn’t fly home so I ate with them here. Everything had come from a box or a can and I met her mother and her mother’s husband and her brother and his family and they were all wearing pleated blue jeans and sweatshirts with various designs and decorations and I had loved the whole affair — the blandness and mediocrity of it — and how they’d had no idea it was bland or mediocre.
• Her friends from home are married, two children in. She can’t talk to them anymore because they don’t tell the truth: they tell her childbirth is beautiful and marriages only grow stronger; they ask her opinion on countertops and patio furniture and dishware, things that don’t mean anything and yet they seem convinced of their importance.
• “Hey, babe,” he says. “Hey, love.” I don’t look at him. Other women may do their best to be nice and accommodating but I try to be as unlikeable as possible, test men too soon. The right one will love me for it, I imagine, though i’ve been through enough to know that the right one doesn’t exist, this perfect man who will be whole yet malleable, who will allow me to be as ugly as I want.
• And later he came up to my bedroom and got on his knees and lifted my dress and I made him go home because already I loved him, because already I knew it was the kind of love where you’re so afraid they’re going to leave you give them no other choice.
• I guessed the one thing I couldn’t understand about life was why no one seemed to be with the person they loved most in the world.
• I let myself into the house and lowered the air conditioner, turned on the TV and put a bag of popcorn in the microwave, everything humming and working and saying hello and welcome; we’re glad you’ve returned! I would figure this out, I thought, and I would. I would soon be backing into parking spaces and tooling around the city. I would nearly hit a very attractive young man on a bike and he’d skid and fall but would catch himself before hitting the pavement. He would be angry but no harm done. He would not ask for my number or become the love of my life, like he would in a good story, in a story I couldn’t write. I would become a vegetarian, swim in cold springs with elderly people before everyone else woke up, hike up a pink hill in the wrong shoes. I would know when things opened and closed and how to get there and where to park and what to order and I would have new boyfriends I would not marry. But all of this would come later and take time, and perhaps it would take me longer than it would take other people but there were some who never left home, who never went anywhere at all.
• My phone rings; it’s our mother. I hit decline even though it’s the second time she’s called today and she panics when I don’t answer twice in a row–she thinks I might be dead–but I talked to her yesterday and felt bad about myself for an hour, at least. The thing I hate most is how I can never recall what she’s said that upset me so much. I try explaining it to people and I’m the one who sounds like an asshole.

Long Way Down by Nick Hornby

• Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
• It’s currency like any other, self-worth. you spend years saving up, and you can blow it all in an evening if you so choose.
• There was a breakup coming, you could smell it, and no one was saying anything. And it was for the same reason, which was that we’d taken things as far as we could, and there was nowhere for us to go. That’s why everyone breaks up, I guess.
• “I was wondering… Maybe it would be good to talk about it somewhere other than here. In a pub, say.” “Sounds good to me,” I said. “I mean, maybe we should celebrate anyway, you know?” “Celebrate,” said Martin, like I was nuts. “Yeah I mean, we’re alive, and, and–” The list kind of ran out after that. But being alive seemed worth the price of a round of drinks. Being alive seemed worth celebrating. Unless, of course, it wasn’t what you wanted, in which case… Oh, fuck it. I wanted a drink anyway. If we couldn’t think of anything else, then me wanting a drink was worth celebrating. An ordinary human desire had emerged through the fog of depression and indecision.

In Five Years by Rebecca Serle

• I wouldn’t say I’m a romantic, exactly. But I believe in romance, which is to say, I believe in calling to inquire about a date instead of texting, and flowers after sex, and Frank Sinatra at an engagement. And New York City in December.
• I think sacrifice is in direct opposition to manifestation. If you want your dreams you should look for abundance, not scarcity.
• We are like constellations passing each other, seeing each other’s light but in the distance. It feels impossible how much space there can be in this intimacy, how much privacy. And I think that maybe that is what love is. Not the absence of space but the acknowledgment of it, the thing that lives between the parts, the thing that makes it possible not to be one, but to be different, to be two.
• You mistake love. You think it has to have a future in order to matter, but it doesn’t. It’s the only thing that does not need to become at all. It matters only insofar as it exists. Here. Now. Love doesn’t require a future.
• We’ve been on these parallel tracks. Moving constantly forward in space but never actually touching, for fear of throwing each other off course. Like if we were aligned in the same direction, we’d never have to compromise. But the thing about parallel tracks is you can be inches apart, or miles. And lately it feels like the width between David and me is extraordinary. We just didn’t notice because we were still looking at the same horizon. But it dawns on me that I want someone in my way. I want us to collide.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

• Be wary of men with something to prove.
• That is the fastest way to ruin a woman’s reputation, after all — to imply that she has not adequately threaded the needle that is being sexually satisfying without ever appearing to desire sexual satisfaction.
• She was crying now, the tears streaking down her face and carrying her mascara with them. I put my arms around her and wiped her cheek with my thumb. “I love you so much, sweetheart. So, so much. And it’s in part because of things like that. You’re an idealist and a romantic, and you have a beautiful soul. And I wish the world was ready to be the way you see it. I wish that the rest of the people on earth with us were capable of living up to your expectations. But they aren’t. The world is ugly, and no one wants to give anyone the benefit of the doubt about anything. When we lose our work and our reputations, when we lose our friends and, eventually, what money we have, we will be destitute. I’ve lived that life before. And I cannot let it happen to you. I will do whatever I can to prevent you from living that way. Do you hear me? I love you too much to let you live only for me.

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

• I wrote this book because I was confused after the election, because confusion sits at odds with my temperament, because writing is my only strategy for making this conflict go away. I’m convinced by this story, even as I can see its photonegative: I wrote this book because I am always confused, because I can never be sure of anything, and because I am drawn to any mechanism that directs me away from that truth. Writing is either a way to shed my self-delusions or a way to develop them. A well-practiced, conclusive narrative is usually a dubious one: that a person is “not into drama,” or that America needs to be made great again, or that America is already great.

Three Women by Lisa Taddeo

• Everything her mother did was what she thought was best, as all mothers do — invisible service in the shadows of the things for which they themselves had longed.
• After she threw a lavish soirée for a third graders birthday party. And yet, here she was, standing in this restaurant, feeling that she inhabited the body of someone she didn’t entirely understand. Partly this was born from the fear of not having an identity. Because she had never quite known who she was, she tried very hard to concentrate on, at the very least, not being boring. And sometimes she had done exciting, out-of-character things to ensure nobody would call her boring. But sometimes those things made her feel loveless, tainted, and cold.
• But life knows when to throw in a plot twist. It is an idle but seasoned screenwriter, drinking beers alone and cultivating its archery.
• She could remember only physical impressions of their presence in her childhood. Pearl shirt buttons, gifted ties, the period of time during which she and her brother wrote their names in bubble letters. The notion of father and brother felt scripted. The day was senselessly beautiful. The sun was shining a fine yellow spray across the course and the greens were startlingly bright. Sloan knew that one couldn’t easily travel back in time to replay a memory. The gate that guards the reality of one’s childhood is high and existentially heavy, and merely opening it takes more energy than one expects. There are tricks to it, too: you have to select the correct season of the correct year. You cannot go bumbling about in some generalized way and hope to uncover the reason you are afraid of wolves.
• Throughout history, men have broken women’s hearts in a particular way. They love them or half-love them and then grow weary and spend weeks and months extricating themselves soundlessly, pulling their tails back into their doorways, drying themselves off, and never calling again. Meanwhile, women wait. The more in love they are and the fewer options they have, the longer they wait, hoping that he will return with a smashed phone, with a smashed face, and say, I’m sorry, I was buried alive and the only thing I thought of was you, and feared that you would think I’d forsaken you when the truth is only that I lost your number, it was stolen from me by the men who buried me alive, and I’ve spent three years looking in phone books and now I have found you. I didn’t disappear, everything I felt didn’t just leave. You were right to know that would be cruel, unconscionable, impossible. Marry me. Some women wait because if they don’t, there’s a threat of evanescence. He is the only one, in the moment, whom she believes she will ever desire. The problem can be economic. Revolutions take a long time to reach places where people share more country living recipes than articles about ending female subjugation.
• I think about my mother’s sexuality and how she occasionally used it. The little things, the way she made her face up before she left the house or opened the door. To me, it always seemed a strength or a weakness, but never its own pounding heart. How wrong I was.
• Still, I wonder how a woman could have let a man masturbate behind her back for so many days. I wonder if she cried at night. Perhaps she even cried for the lonely old man. It’s the nuances of desire that hold the truth of who we are at our rawest moments. I set out to register the heat and sting of female want so that men and other women might more easily comprehend before they condemn. Because it’s the quotidian minutes of our lives that will go on forever, that will tell us who we were, who our neighbors and our mothers were, when we were too diligent in thinking they were nothing like us.