Gracie

“But the people who did get that love, they grew up to be different from us. More secure. Maybe they’re not as shiny or successful as you and I feel we have to be. But it’s not because they’re not interesting. They just don’t feel they have to do the tap dance, you know? They don’t have to prove themselves all the time to be loved. Because they always were.”
― Coco Mellors, Cleopatra and Frankenstein

“I think of how keenly I've been wrong. I think of all the gods I have made out of feeble men.”
― Raven Leilani, Luster

“Whatever I am, or have since become, I know now that slipperiness isn’t all of it. I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet