Awwwtrouble

“Love was not something, I realized, that came to you from outside. I had always thought that love was supposed to come from other people, and somehow, I was failing to catch the crumbs of it, failing to eat them, and I went around belly empty and desperate. I didn’t know that love was supposed to come from within me, and that as long as I loved others, the strength and warmth of that love would fill me, make me strong.”
― Rufi Thorpe, Margo's Got Money Troubles

“I try to stay vigilant because everybody's health and safety depends on it, and also, if I relax now I will fall asleep for the entire rest of my life and wake up dead.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich

“There is a desperation to a novel that is unsettling. The world so painstakingly re-created in miniature; this tiny diorama made of words. Why go to all this trouble, to create me, to seduce you, to enumerate so many different breakfast cereals? To make the cunning tiny apartment, the itsy-bitsy Jinx? It's like going to meet your new boyfriend's family for the first time and discovering they are all paid actors. It's almost easier to believe I'm real than to understand what's actually going on. The desperation that could have caused anyone to invent me in the first place. The urgency and need that would require creating an imaginary space of this size and level of detail.
And it really makes you wonder: What kind of truth would require this many lies to tell?”
― Rufi Thorpe, Margo's Got Money Troubles

“often an empty nest is two birds looking at each other, shell-shocked and nostalgic, over the single worm they’re now splitting for dinner, discussing what to do with the worm leftovers.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich