Alyssa

“She also once had the feeling she could write all day, words spilling in a waterfall, both foamy and clear, pouring into a green pool, out of her pen onto the paper. The only thing then which kept her from writing constantly was the nervous recognition that she'd miss the things other people were doing and become even more separated from life than she already felt herself to be. To stay so much in the world of writing she would not learn about the world, and she had a lot to learn. How could she write without learning how to live. The netherworld of writing offered a suspension in reverie, but she was just as interested in engaging, watching people in action, seeing new places, studying whatever was in front of her.
Shed learned that if she didn't make the effort to engage with that world, shed lose her connection to it, lose her ability to be with the people in it and to love them, and possibly vanish in a mist.”
― Susan Minot, Don't Be a Stranger

“If you have to, you can. Beginnings and endings. Endings and beginnings. I can uncoil like a sweater and make a new shape. I can loosen and change. Stretch and expand.
Begin and end. Then begin again.”
― Shoshana von Blanckensee, Girls Girls Girls

“She'd heard once that guilt was for something you'd done- you could feel guilty for a certain behavior or action but still fundamentally know you were a good person- but shame was deeper, shame was for who you were.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours….Memory is the enemy of wonder, which abides nowhere else but the present.”
― Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World