Eunice (nerdytalksbookblog)

“Girls in those stories are always victims, and I am not. And it doesn’t have anything to do with what Strane did or didn’t do to me when I was younger. I’m not a victim because I never wanted to be, and If I didn’t want to be, then I’m not. That’s how it works. The difference between rape and sex is state of mind. You can’t rape the willing, right?”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“And from those brief moments I was living with a certainty that I was exactly where I should be, where everything is deeply quiet and deeply alive. I thought about the many aspects in this life that I could not control or understand despite how much I wanted to or tried. How my father’s life, my mother’s life, the lives around me and the figures from the past they are not mine to determine, not mine to map out no matter how much they shaped what I had become however much we were connected. I could only help in small ways, I could listen and piece together and recount. But what was truly mine was only a little, no, a miniscule speck of it all. And while this is a sort of devastation to me, when I knew it would take some time to fully accept, it felt nice at least to be on the way in spite of not knowing exactly how far I had come nor how far I have left to go.”
― Alexandra Chang, Days of Distraction

“Growing up, we were surrounded by stories of women being married off without their consent, and it was always about how they compromised, reconciled, and found love in the end. It was romanticized so much. What an abhorrent thing to tell someone — that your love isn’t where your interest lie, or that your parents know what’s best for you better than you do.”
― Sonali Dev, Recipe for Persuasion

“It is the nature of relationships that they are impossible to fully understand from the outside. Their inner workings both from memories and habits and histories made out of exterior world. And from those known only between the two involved that exists only through them and are lost when they are lost to each other. A relationship is particular in the way people are particular. Whatever lesson one can glean from people’s relationships can only be taken in pieces assembled into bare minimal instructions.”
― Alexandra Chang