irina

“I had been hoping to defer the call as long as I could, so that I should have something to look forward to in the dead waste of time I foresaw before me, after my dinner was done with, but, at a quarter before seven, when darkness already surrounded the castle, I could contain myself no longer. I telephoned my mother. And astonished myself by bursting into tears when I heard her voice.”
― Angela Carter

“Pick a card, any card', he said, and as he said it, Kit regretted every single choice she'd made that had brought her to this moment. This is what she had always wanted to avoid: being forced to pretend men were interesting.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid

“Vita having this moment (twenty minutes ago) left me, what are my feelings? Of a dim November fog; the lights dulled and damped. But this will disperse; then I shall want her, clearly and distinctly.”
― Virginia Woolf, Love Letters: Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West

“Carmen's ex-boyfriend Tom was a social worker and weekend DJ who eventually left her for reasons I never quite managed to grasp. Carmen typically speaks about him the way one might refer to a degree: a three-year period one has to endure in order to talk with overbearing authority on exactly one subject. She is the world's living expert on loving and losing thirty-year-old men named Tom.”
― Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea