Vanessa

“When we live our lives in this perpetual state of body monitoring, we are living passively, being judged and consumed by ourselves and others - not as self-actualized humans actively making choices.”
― Lindsay Kite, More Than a Body: Your Body Is an Instrument, Not an Ornament

“She told us as much about herself as she saw fit, but generally she said little, like a real mother whose past has become immaterial in her total concern for the future of her children.”
― Magda Szabo , The Door

“The tragedies we steel ourselves for never come for years and years, and our negative fantasies wear us down inch by inch, so that when the blow actually comes, there's little left of us to care.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me

“In London her grief was retracted into sudden realisations of her loss. She had thought that sorrow would be her companion for many years and had planned for its entertainment. Now it visited her like sudden snow-storms, a hastening darkness across the sky, a transient whiteness and rigour cast upon her. She tried to recover the sentiment of renunciation which she had worn like a veil. It was gone, and gone with it was her sense of the dignity of bereavement.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner