Vyn

“Somewhere on the island is a place where we can rest. Somewhere on the island is a place where we belong, where we will lie down next to each other and know we will never have to look again. But until we find it we are searchers, two figures moving through a landscape while outside and around us the world is born and lives and dies and the stars burn themselves slowly into darkness.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“The layers of loss make life feel papery thin.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“A sister is not a friend. Who can explain the urge to take a relationship as primal and complex as a sibling and reduce it to something as replaceable, as banal as a friend? Yet this status is used again and again to connote the highest intimacy. True sisterhood is not the same as friendship. You don't choose each other and there is no furtive period of getting to know each other. You are a part of each other, right from the start. Look at an umbilical cord—tough, sinuous, unlovely, yet essential—and compare it to a friendship bracelet of brightly woven thread. That is the difference between a sister and a friend.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“But for the rest of the party, he would feel strangely elsewhere, as if floating above the room, and at dinner, where he would be seated not with the bright young things of the gathering but, rather, among their parents’ friends and relations—the father’s sister, for example, or the mother’s elderly uncle—he would feel the full force of his undeniable otherness, how what he had striven to conceal had been recognized and accounted for by everyone in their circle. From the other end of the table would occasionally come gusts of laughter, and his seatmate would shake his or her head indulgently, before turning to him and commenting on the irrepressible frivolity of the young, and how one must allow them such latitudes. Sometimes after saying this they would realize their mistake, and hastily add that he, too, must have his moments of mirth, but other times they would not; he would be aged before his time, cast from the island of youth not by his years but by his temperament”
― Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise