Emily

“I know love is dark work; you have to get your hands dirty. If you hold back, nothing interesting happens. At the same time, you have to find the right distance between people. Too close, and they overwhelm you; too far and they abandon you. How to hold them in the right relation?”
― Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy

“He died at the wrong time, when there was much to be clarified and established. They hadn’t even started to be grown-ups together. There was this piece of heaven, this little girl he’d carried around the shop on his shoulders; and then one day she was gone, replaced by a foreigner, an uncooperative woman he didn’t know how to speak to. Being so confused, so weak, so in love, he chose strength and drove her away from himself. The last years he spent wondering where she’d gone, and slowly came to realise that she would never return, and that the husband he’d chosen for her was an idiot.”
― Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia

“Everything has become very conventional. You're either in or you're out. I'm with the out- with the weird, the impossible, the victimised and the broken. It's the only place to be.”
― Hanif Kureishi, Midnight all Day

“To stay or to go, it amounted to the same thing.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger