Tay Ngo

“We loved once, and we loved badly. We loved again, and again we loved badly. We did it a third time, and we were no longer living in a world free of experience. We saw that love did not make us tender, wise, or compassionate. Under its influence we gave up neither our fears nor our angers. Within ourselves we remained unchanged. The development was an astonishment: not at all what had been expected. The atmosphere became charged with revelation, and it altered us permanently as a culture.”
― Vivian Gornick, The End of The Novel of Love

“Sometimes it felt like the disease he most acutely suffered from was being a dick. When I was angry with him, all of his problems seem to spring from a fundamental narcissism, entitlement.… Other times I thought clinically: I love a man with a fatal disease. It was eminently medical, physical. Arbitrary. Tragic. He could see it that way, too, particularly as it began to close in on him.”
― Nina Renata Aron, Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls: A Memoir of Women, Addiction, and Love

“I don't know how the average person survives the period of limerence, that chemical insanity of early love, in the age of text messaging. How we avoid crashing our cars, walking into walls or out of open windows.”
― Nina Renata Aron, Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls: A Memoir of Women, Addiction, and Love

“Put romantic love at the center of a novel today, and who could be persuaded that in its pursuit the characters are going to get to something large? That love is going to throw them up against themselves in such a way that we will all learn something important about how we got to be as we are, or how the time in which we live got to be as it is. No one, it seems to me. Today, I think, love as a metaphor is an act of nostalgia, not of discovery.”
― Vivian Gornick, The End of The Novel of Love