Autumn Ungerer

“She thought how curious it was that responses such as this--emotions, even--could run parallel with but quite separate from unhappiness. I am unhappy all the time, she thought, and that is a total occupation, but some other part of me still goes on working. I still see that things are beautiful, or significant, and that prompts a feeling. I can be angry, or pleased. But all this with detachment, as though it happened to someone else. It is as though half of me were some stranger, living independently.”
― Penelope Lively, Perfect Happiness

“I tell a story about the relations I choose, only to expose, somewhere along the way, the way I am gripped and undone by these very relations. My narrative falters, as it must. Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something.”
― Judith Butler, Violence, Mourning, Politics

“Arrogance is a curse bestowed upon the emotionally blind.”
― Ayura Ayira, Nuclear Harlot

“Love—as it is in the wild, no fingerprints on the glass—knows nothing of time. If you were lucky enough for your first fall to be in love and not loss, you might get what I'm talking about. The pure stuff, like flying before you look down. Like learning that the body you thought you had to fill out all by yourself actually came with an extension; that neither worked alone, but together—bam, all of the lights come on.
That's how love is supposed to be. When you add in time, however, it does what time always does. Brings everything, eventually, inevitably, to its end.
After loss, love is never the same. That is not to say you won't love another, maybe even more than ever before. But as you love them, you will mourn them. You'll try not to, of course. Try to say, "You'll never know." But you do. You know.
And every inch gained in flight is an inch added to the fall.
That's why, when you're flat-backed on the belt, we don't cut the love out. Every time you manage to think about that which you love—remember a face or a smell—you will be bird-dogged, instantly, by the bone saw of reality. Not how it will end, but how it always has.
Love tortures you more than we ever could.”
― Claudia Lux, Sign Here