vienna

“Sometimes the women pitied me, saying that at least they'd known real life, and I was very jealous of them, but they died, as I am about to die, and what does having lived mean once you are no longer alive?”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“Maybe there’s a universe out there — happening now — where we end up together.
Maybe there’s a universe where I’m the right person for you. Where I adore every nice thing you did for me without starting to resent you. A universe where you actually end up with someone who appreciates you. Where no one becomes a doormat. Where both of us can shed our baggage and curiosity and issues.

If you think of it all this way, then it’s like neither of us did anything wrong.

You just found me in the wrong universe. That’s all.

Because you could have loved me forever. And maybe in another universe, I let you.”
― Gaby Dunn

“Eurydice, dying now a second time, uttered no complaint against her husband. What was there to complain of, but that she had been loved?”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses

“The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living, that will not be me, because I will be dead, and will not be that person as they were before reading, because my story, added to their mind, will then become part of their thinking.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men