carol.

“life cannot be repaired, it can only be recreated through symbolic repetition of the cosmogony”
― Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion

“She has no name for that feeling of utter abandonment, nor the feeling that comes over her on fair days, when she stands in the courtyard from the photo, and the voice of the loudspeaker booms front behind the trees, and the music and commercials run together in an unintelligible blur. It is as if she were standing outside the fete, separated from some earlier thing.”
― Annie Ernaux, Les Années

“Maybe what she meant was that obviously she wasn't a lady because there was no way she could be. To be ordinary, as if pride were not the first manifestations of shame.”
― Édouard Louis, The End of Eddy

“In grandiose moments, high on fresh air and freedom on the hill, I study my personal geology.

My body is a continent. Forces are at work in the night. A bruxist, I grind my teeth in my sleep, like tectonic plates. When I blink the sun flickers, my breath pushes the clouds across the sky and the waves roll into the shore in time with my beating heart. Lightning strikes every time I sneeze, and when I orgasm, there's an earthquake. The islands' headlands rise above the sea, like my limbs in the bathtub, my freckles are famous landmarks and my tears rivers. My lovers are tectonic plates and stone cathedrals.”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun