Sarah

“My mother sobbed. "I'm not asking for that much." But she was: She was asking him to be someone else.”
― Sigrid Nunez, A Feather on the Breath of God

“I began to realize what everyone in the world knows and routinely forgets: that to be loved sexually is to be loved not for one's actual self but for one's ability to arouse desire in the other...Only the thoughts in one's mind or intuitions of the spirit can attract permanently...”
― Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City

“As I saw myself moving ever farther toward the social margin, nothing healed me of a sore and angry heart like a walk through the city. To see in the street the fifty different ways people struggle to remain human—the variety and inventiveness of survival techniques—was to feel the pressure relieved, the overflow draining off. I felt in my nerve endings the common refusal to go under.”
― Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City

“I hated this. Hated the sense that I got from Fang that there was some magical beanstalk I had to climb. Nothing good comes from climbing beanstalks, didn't he know that? There are giants up there. But Fang did know. The whole point was to climb to the giants and become a giant yourself.”
― Weike Wang, Joan Is Okay