Antonia

“Ein Saum von Sonnenlicht erschien am Horizont, wortlos sahen wir zu, wie die Landstraße vor uns allmählich aus der Dunkelheit auftauchte. Alvas Fingerspitzen strichen über meinen Unterarm, auf und ab, auf und ab, und vielleicht war das der Moment, in dem ich mein Leben nicht mehr gegen ein anderes tauschen wollte, nicht mal gegen jenes, in dem meine Eltern noch gelebt hätten.”
― Benedict Wells, Vom Ende der Einsamkeit

“But do you ever experience a sort of diluted, personalised version of that feeling, as if your own life, your own world, has slowly but perceptibly become an uglier place? Or even a sense that while you used to be in step with the cultural discourse, you’re not anymore, and you feel yourself adrift from the world of ideas, alienated, with no intellectual home? Maybe it is about our specific historical moment, or maybe it’s just about getting older and disillusioned, and it happens to everyone. When I look back on what we were like when we first met, I don’t think we were really wrong about anything, except about ourselves. The ideas were right, but the mistake was that we thought we mattered. Well, we’ve both had that particular error ground out of us in different ways – me by achieving precisely nothing in over a decade of adult life, and you (if you’ll forgive me) by achieving as much as you possibly could and still not making one grain of difference to the smooth functioning of the capitalist system. When we were young, we thought our responsibilities stretched out to encompass the earth and everything that lived on it.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“... there are two kinds of labyrinths: those you are born into and must escape, and those you choose to enter in search of what lies inside.”
― Lindsey Drager, The Archive of Alternate Endings

“It is easy to forget, but stories need not always have a purpose. We are quick to say that folktales have a moral or a lesson or a creed. But most of the stories that have survived the ages are told for one purpose only, and that purpose is to say this: "Being human is difficult. Here is some evidence.”
― Lindsey Drager, The Archive of Alternate Endings