Alaine

“How often in life he has found himself a frustrated observer of apparently impenetrable systems, watching other people participate effortlessly in structures he can find no way to enter or even understand. So often that it’s practically baseline, just normal existence for him. And this is not only due to the irrational nature of other people, and the consequent irrationality of the rules and processes they devise; it’s due to Ivan himself, his fundamental unsuitedness to life. He knows this. He feels himself to have been formed, somehow, with something other than life in mind.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“That was part of being a girl--you were resigned to whatever feedback you'd get. If you got mad, you were crazy, and if you didn't react, you were a bitch. The only thing you could do was smile from the corner they'd backed you into. Implicate yourself in the joke even if the joke was always on you.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“More than anything, The One True God was a potent weapon used by sexually repressed members of society to inflict misery on everyone else.”
― Jarett Kobek, I Hate the Internet

“The whole world was on a script of loss and people only received their pages moments before they read their lines.”
― Jarett Kobek, I Hate the Internet