Caitlin

“She has been contained before, contained and directed, by the trappings of ordinary life. Now she no longer feels contained or directed by anything at all. Life has slipped free of its netting. She can do very strange things now, she can find herself a very strange person. Young men can invite her into holiday cottages for sexual reasons. It means nothing. That isn't true: it means something, but the meaning is unfamiliar.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“How often in life he has found himself a frustrated observer of apparently impenetrable systems, watching other people participate effortlessly in structures he can find no way to enter or even understand. So often that it’s practically baseline, just normal existence for him. And this is not only due to the irrational nature of other people, and the consequent irrationality of the rules and processes they devise; it’s due to Ivan himself, his fundamental unsuitedness to life. He knows this. He feels himself to have been formed, somehow, with something other than life in mind.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“I know everything.” Heinz sputtered and fumed somewhat like an automobile himself, and said, “I’m God!” Grainier thought about how to answer. Here seemed a conversation that could go no farther.”
― Denis Johnson, Train Dreams

“A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness