Lou

“...very lonely and, often, very unhappy, with the poignant misery that comes to lonely people who long to be social and cannot, somehow, step naturally and unselfconsciously into some friendly group”
― Shirley Jackson, Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories

“All I want is to be cherished, she thought, and here I am talking gibberish with a selfish man.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“A warm body sighed in the darkness inside the little bright object balanced elegantly in the orbit of the moon.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea

“I like men very much, but sometimes ... they're so stupid, so stuffed with theories .... They go in straight lines only, and won't stop. It's dangerous to do that. It's dangerous to leave everything up to the men, you know. That's one reason why I'd like to go home, at least for a visit. To see what Elia with his theories, and my dear young Lev with his ideals, are up to. I get worried they'll go too fast and too straight and get us into a place we can't get out of, a trap. You see it seems to me that where men are weak and dangerous is in their vanity. A woman has a center, is a center. But a man isn't, he's a reaching out. So he reaches out and grabs things and piles them up around him and says, I'm this, I'm that, this is me, that's me, I'll prove that I am me! And he can wreck a lot of things, trying to prove it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Eye of the Heron