Blake Christian

“We were always surrounded by books and words and poetry, all the fierce passions of the world bound in leather and vellum.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“Personally I have to exercise a lot of agency in reading, and understanding what I read, and bearing it all in mind for long enough to make sense of the book as I go along. In no sense does it feel like a passive process by which beauty is transmitted to me without my involvement; it feels like an active effort, which an experience of beauty is the constructed result. But, I think more importantly, great novels engage my sympathies and make me desire things.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“Perhaps they were involved in something illicit, or something that newly appeared so to them—the way we understood our own behavior shifted according to whether or not we thought we were being seen.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“So when it hurt and I was too proud to say stop and so said more, I believed, like a Catholic or a Tortured Artist, that the merit of a commitment correlates directly to the pain you endure in its pursuit.”
― Raven Leilani, Luster