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“She lets out a trembling kind of laugh. Well, if there is a God, she says, I'm sure he loves you very much. He lowers his eyes. Yeah, I can feel that sometimes, he says. Like when I'm with you, I can. If you don't mind me saying that.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“She often told herself that story, easing herself into sleep, drifting off as she patched together the ghostly memory of someone in whose real existence she hardly believed any more.”
― Paula Fox, Desperate Characters

“Wild Geese"

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
― Mary Oliver, Dream Work

“It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories