maya

“People thought that being one of a kind made you special. No, it just made you lonely. What was special was belonging with someone else.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“When someone shows you how little you mean to them and you keep coming back for more, before you know it you start to mean less to yourself. You are not made up of compartments! You are one whole person! What gets said to you gets said to all of you, ditto what gets done. Being treated like shit is not an amusing game or a transgressive intellectual experiment. It’s something you accept, condone, and learn to believe you deserve. This is so simple. But I tried so hard to make it complicated.”
― Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A young woman tells you what she's "learned"

“What looked like a snap to other people was actually an erosion of the surfaces that we built up for protection, and unfortunately people would rather dwell on the snap than the wearing.”
― Addie E. Citchens, Dominion

“She didn't read books so she didn't know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God