cleo

“He wished he loved her a little more or hated her a little less, something to tip the scale. Instead, he lived in the fraught balance between the two, each increasing the intensity of the other....”
― Coco Mellors, Cleopatra and Frankenstein

“It’s a mistake to believe social media is all about hearts and thumbs, flames and eggplants. If everyone were only trying to be liked then it’d be kinder, and way more boring. But discourse is loneliness disguised as war. What people there really want is to be perceived on their own terms, which is so, so funny. Because if the grand promise of the internet was to be whoever you want, in reality it will make of you whatever it wants, and beneath every mask is another mask mistaken for a face.”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection

“Only then, in the quietness beneath, did the new feeling arrive. It was shame . Shame that she had quit her job, shame that she did not paint, shame that she had married Frank, shame that he was in love with someone else, shame that she had run to Anders for comfort, shame that he had discarded her, shame that Frank drank like he did, shame that they let Jesus die, shame that Frank had let her tear apart the whole apartment looking for her before coming clean about what he’d done, shame that she’d covered for him and told everyone that Jesus had escaped, shame that it was her secret now too, shame that she was too afraid to leave him when she said she would, shame that her mother was dead and she could not ask her for advice, shame that her mother didn’t want to be her mother enough to not be dead, just shame, shame, shame.”
― Coco Mellors, Cleopatra and Frankenstein

“The hole is loneliness,' said Cleo quietly.
'Why's that?' said Audrey,
'You can't stand above someone and tell them to get out of it,' she said. 'Or teach or preach it out of them. You have to be in it with them.”
― Coco Mellors, Cleopatra and Frankenstein