Elaina

“It seems universally accepted that the ocean and its unrelenting tide is a source of comfort and peace. The Pacific Ocean is, after all, named the Pacific. I myself find it boring. But boredom is a kind of comfort, and a modern luxury. Boredom can be pacifying. What does the ocean really do, but deliver one predictable wave after another? In this way it’s like life. Every morning my body wakes, crunches, shits, cries out for food. Then it aches and moves and works and tires, eats and sleeps again, setting up the same for the following morning. This is a kind of tide. It isn’t calming or pacific.”
― Brad Phillips, Essays and Fictions

“How could I have thought that I needed to cure myself in order to fit into the 'real' world? I didn't need curing, and the world didn't, either; the only thing that did need curing was my understanding of my place in it. Without that understanding - without a sense of belonging to the real world - it was impossible to thrive in an imagined one.”
― Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone

“Your life doesn’t happen in any kind of order. Events don’t have cause and effect relationships the way you wish they did. It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations. Language and water have this in common.”
― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water

“Men are apt to idolize or fear that which they cannot understand, especially if it be a woman.”
― Jean Toomer, Cane