Awwwtrouble

“She shakes her head, pressing her lips into a line. "It makes me very angry." Her dark eyes look black in the flat light. "Makes me angry still. TO have a place tainted like that...it's another violation on top of the original one. It happens all the time- you go walking somewhere, or swimming or running - whatever it is, your thing, the thing you enjoy - you go to a place, and it's beautiful and unspoiled, and you are doing that thing you love, and then someone - not always a man, I suppose, but usually a man - comes along and transforms it into an ugly place. And you never feel safe there again. And you are never the same again. The place is changed and you are changed, and neither for the better.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour

“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

“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

“Life is a seesaw, and I am standing dead center, still and balanced: living kids on one side, living parents on the other. Nicky here with me at the fulcrum. Don’t move a muscle, I think. But I will, of course. You have to.”
― Catherine Newman, Sandwich