Amelia

“He knows that a lot of the literary people in college see books primarily as a way of appearing cultured, It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. Even the writer himself was a good person, and even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Shug had seen it before, those with least to give always gave the most.”
― Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain

“However—there isn’t just one reality. Reality is something you have to choose by yourself, out of several possible alternatives.”
― Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls

“The demands of other people do not dissolve; they only multiply. More and more complex, more difficult. Which is another way, she thinks, of saying: more life, more and more of life.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo