Michaela Cotner

“What was the secret? What did we lack? Why was it important? And so what? Guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness. Jealousy we understood and thought natural—a desire to have what somebody else had; but envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye: A Novel

“But the sick feeling tugging down on his heart, that was real. The never-ending humiliation and degradation, that was real. The feeling of being trapped inside his own body, inside his own life: that was as real as it fucking came.”
― Luke Dumas, Nothing Tastes as Good

“relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Of course, all those violent scenarios she’s been warned about happen with much less frequency than the daily slights. Things so small she never considered them violent until she stopped to consider what they steal. The interrupting while she’s speaking, the assumptions about her intelligence, the shrinking options to make choices about her body, the underrepresentation in every decision-making sphere, the free-for-all on guns that has given her a constant case of low-grade anxiety, and the consistent commoditization of the female body, to name the first things that come to mind. It all amounts to a flashing sign with the message that women are not so much unique individuals as vessels for other people’s fixations and desires.”
― Johanna Copeland, Our Kind of Game