Danielle

“I like to think of sand like love. The thing that’s true ’bout both of ’em is you only ever see them for what they look like when they’re right in front of you. And isn’t that sorta reckless? To only believe the thing in front of your face, not knowing nothing about where it came from. I loved reckless once. I took what was right in front of me ’cause it looked something like love and I didn’t know different and that’s what gets us sometimes. We think we’re loving when, really, we’re believing. We’re choosing to believe the sand was always white ’cause when we sink our toes into it and the heat surrounds our feet like warm hands, it feels like it can only be God’s hands. That there wasn’t no way it wasn’t created with the earth itself. But real love—love that you see every glimpse of like knocking on the door of a glass room—shows all of itself before it materializes solid. Look close enough and you see your own face, your own hands leathery and creased. Step back and you see the whole world. The quartz tumbling down the mountain to make sand as white and soft as crushed bone.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“Eyelashes. Get one stuck in the whites of your eye and you’ll feel the phantom of it long after it’s gone. Hope is like that too, I think. Once you feel the spark of it, suddenly it haunts every image and who you was before, what you thought you was okay with, all that breaks open to leave you hunched in a tub surrounded by remnants of who you could’ve been.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“Unrequited love is like believing in fairies for a little too long, past the age it’s acceptable. Sure, there’s the eventual devastation that this thing you thought was real suddenly evaporated into nothing. But the worst part of it is the shame that you ever believed at all.”
― Leila Mottley, The Girls Who Grew Big

“I suppose the main thing I feel now, and I want you to remember I’ve had a drink or two, is that I would have liked to have loved someone. You know, mutually, and for a period of time, and at that time of life, when you’ve got so much of it. Love, not salmon. I think I’d have been good at it. That’s what I wanted, and I did try, really. But he was the wrong . . . I don’t know . . . I was going to say object of affection, but he was just an object. It was a bad investment. I should have put it somewhere else.’ ‘Maybe you will.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here