Colleen McConnell

“The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet. What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person? Not directed above us, nor beneath us, but at the same height as our own gaze. Art cannot be experienced collectively, nothing can, art is something you are alone with. You meet its gaze alone.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, A Man in Love

“We can continue to live exactly as we do right now, in a heavy lidded state of love and unspeakable compromise. Isn’t that what people do? Every day? Don’t they ache but rename it tired?”
― Augusten Burroughs, Lust & Wonder

“Attending a poetry reading is like being in a hospital,” he said as we left the next station. “Full of neuroses.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, A Man in Love