sierra

“Just when she thought she had a handle on who someone was, on the exact shape and size of their character, on the precise quantity of their goodness and badness, they insisted on changing.”
― Elaine Hsieh Chou, Disorientation

“This is like coming home, like coming home after years away among Trojans and Lestrygonians, like coming home to a place where everyone is like you, where people know, they just know—coming home as when everything falls into place and you suddenly realize that for seventeen years all you’d been doing was fiddling with the wrong combination.”
― André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name

“Although she had left academia firmly in the rearview mirror, its former habits still clung to her: obsessiveness, overanalyzing meaningless incidents and a deep pleasure derived from sleuthing, or as it was usually known, “researching.”
― Elaine Hsieh Chou, Disorientation

“She'd be split apart, never certain if the submissive and docile figure in the mirror was a reflection of who she really was, or the ghostly effect of someone telling her her entire life: this is who you are, this is all you can ever be.”
― Elaine Hsieh Chou, Disorientation