Bette

“The real story was beyond our ability to tell: our girlhood, our friendship, our love—all monumental, all inconsequential. The world had no place for two girls like us, though I was slow then, not knowing that Fabienne, slighted, thwarted, even fatally wounded, tried to make a fool of that world, on her and on my behalf. Revenge is a story that often begins with more promises than the ending can offer.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“So she wasn’t lying, per se. She was being honest when she said she believed they could be cured. It just wasn’t the pill that cured them. What cured them, in the end, was belief. Belief in the full context of the encounter: the pills they assumed would make them feel better, this partly due to a lifetime’s experience of taking pills that made them feel better; pills of a certain weight (five hundred milligrams) that felt appropriately substantial; pills of a certain color (bright red) that looked therapeutic; pills that were in capsule form (which people believed were more powerful than tablets); pills that were stored in a refrigerator (which people believed were more powerful than room-temperature pills on a shelf); pills prescribed by a medical (seeming) professional, in an office with an exterior sign and interior layout designed to be maximally reassuring—all of these factors meeting the patient’s own strong desire to heal, which produced, finally, a confidence that they would be healed, a kind of confirmation bias that was the true and only source of this medicine. It was its single active ingredient: belief. Her patients were cured because, simply, they believed in the cure.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“And life is more changeable than I thought. I mean a life can be miserable for a long time and then later happy. It’s not just one thing or another—it doesn’t get fixed into a groove called ‘personality’ and then run along that way until the end.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“Lotto once said to her, and she laughed and conceded that she was. She wasn’t sure just then if she was telling the truth or if she was lying. Great”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies