Awwwtrouble

“You are about to begin reading a new book, and to be honest, you are a little tense. The beginning of a novel is like a first date. You hope that from the first lines an urgent magic will take hold, and you will sink into the story like a hot bath, giving yourself over entirely. But this hope is tempered by the expectation that, in reality, you are about to have to learn a bunch of people's names and follow along politely like you are attending the baby shower of a woman you hardly know. And that's fine, goodness knows you've fallen in love with books that didn't grab you in the first paragraph. But that doesn't stop you from wishing they would, from wishing they would come right up to you in the dark of your mind and kiss you on the throat.”
― Rufi Thorpe, Margo's Got Money Troubles

“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

“Grace stood up and turned off the tap. "Yes it was." she looked at Vanessa, at her glassy eyes and her petulant expression; Grace wanted to slap her. "Men like him...they have a special kind of contempt for women like me - ugly women. I've felt it all my life. An ugly woman is barely human to a man like your husband. It's sickening but not all that shocking. What's worse, what is utterly abject, is the way that women like you - the pretty, the chosen - the way you collude in that contempt. simpering like a schoolgirl, because a man has aid you some attention. Laughing cravenly at his cruelties. It's pathetic.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“The children’s features shattered me a little bit—as if someone had siphoned love out of me and tattooed it onto someone else’s face.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich