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“This is how I lived back then– through books. I locked myself into their stories, dreamt of their characters at night, pretended to be them. They were my armour against the hard edges of reality. I carried them with me wherever I went, like a talisman in my pocket, thinking of them as almost more real than the people around me, who spoke and lived in denial, destined, I thought, to never do anything worth recounting.”
― Tomasz Jedrowski, Swimming in the Dark

“There will come a day,
when this horror is not the
only color on your palette.”
― Joy McCullough, Blood Water Paint

“We stood for a moment, uncomfortable, mourning the missed opportunity. We searched for words, each one of us, trying to say something that meant anything. In the end, we just said goodbye. We said it casually, like we would see each other again soon or maybe like people who had never been much more than acquaintances. You two walked off, arm in arm, and I watched you, the burning cigarette still in my hand, the last thing you'd ever given me.”
― Tomasz Jedrowski, Swimming in the Dark

“Because you were right when you said that people can’t always give us what we want from them; that you can’t ask them to love you the way you want. No one can be blamed for that. And the odds had been stacked against us from the start: we had no manual, no one to show us the way. Not one example of a happy couple made up of boys. How were we supposed to know what to do? Did we even believe that we deserved to get away with happiness?”
― Tomasz Jedrowski, Swimming in the Dark