Ruth

“She believes Marianne lacks ‘warmth’, by which she means the ability to beg for love from people who hate her.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“It is a terrible, wretched thing to love someone whom you know cannot love you. There are things that are more dreadful. There are many human pains more grievous. And yet it remains both terrible and wretched. Like so many things, it is insoluble.”
― Naomi Alderman, Disobedience

“And yet we continue not to do anything to stop it, because the things that are causing it, the things we’re doing that are making it worse – building buildings, taking planes, driving cars, eating meat, buying stuff, having children! – these are the very things that make us us. So we seem to be faced with an impossible dilemma: if we don’t want to be killed by climate change, we have to stop being ourselves. You can see why people aren’t exactly rushing to man the barricades. The thought of addressing it actually seems in some ways worse to us than being killed by it. Or put it another way, the thought of no longer being ourselves is harder for us to get our head around than the thought of being dead.”
― Paul Murray, The Bee Sting

“Maybe every era has an atrocity woven into its fabric. Maybe every society is complicit in terrible things and only afterwards gets around to pretending they didn’t know.”
― Paul Murray, The Bee Sting