Lucy

“Nearly everything I know about love, I’ve learned in my long-term friendships with women. Particularly the ones I have lived with at one point or another. I know what it is to know every tiny detail about a person and revel in that knowledge as if it were an academic subject. When it comes to the girls I’ve built homes with, I’m like the woman who can predict what her husband will order at every restaurant.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“He had said, “You won’t write a book about me.” But I haven’t written a book about him, neither have I written a book about myself. All I have done is translate into words—words he will probably never read; they are not intended for him—the way in which his existence has affected my life.”
― Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

“I thought of him as a long-lost relation. A sailor coming into port- agitated, sweat on his brow- who needed somewhere calm to lay his head. He was good company. And it was hard for me to feel I was stealing from anyone when there was so much loss in the air.”
― Susie Boyt, Loved and Missed

“Life is not a zero‐sum game. It owes us nothing, and things just happen the way they do. Sometimes they’re fair and everything makes sense; sometimes they’re so unfair we question everything. I pulled the mask off the face of Fate, and all I found beneath it was chance.”
― Benedict Wells, Vom Ende der Einsamkeit