Michaela Cotner

“Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another—physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap. She forgot lust and simple caring for. She regarded love as possessive mating, and romance as the goal of the spirit.”
― 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

“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

“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