julia silvey

“She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“I can’t lose the thing I’ve held onto for so long, you know?” My face twists up from the pain of pushing it out. “I just really need it to be a love story, you know? I really, really need it to be that.”
“I know,” she says.
“Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it”? I look to her glassy eyes, her face of wide open empathy. “It’s my life,” I say. “This has been my whole life.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“A reminder to remember: just because the sharpness of the sadness has faded does not mean that it was not, once, terrible. It means only that time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, have stepped between the two of you, and they are keeping you safe as they were once unable to.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“In this way, the Dream House was a haunted house. You were the sudden, inadvertent occupant of a place where bad things had happened. And then it occurs to you one day, standing in the living room, that you are this house's ghost: you are the one wandering from room to room with no purpose, gaping at the moving boxes that are never unpacked, never certain what you're supposed to do. After all, you don't need to die to leave a mark of psychic pain. If anyone is living in the Dream House now, he or she might be seeing the echo of you.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House