Thea

“Sometimes you can’t tell how consuming love is until you can see its absence. Sometimes you can’t recognize love because it’s changed you, like a chimera, so slowly that you didn’t witness the transformation.”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“If my diary is ever published, it can’t be called Old Sore. I have come up with the following alternatives: 1. Down the Drain 2. The Living End 3. Over and Out 4. Not the Bee’s Knees 5. The Last Hurrah 6. Smoke Signals in a Hurricane (Sounds good but doesn’t really apply here) 7. Flies on the Caviar (ditto)”
― Hendrik Groen, The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen, 83¼ Years Old

“The Mirage’s entertainment director asks Klara if she’ll let Raj saw her in half—“Easy-peasy; won’t hurt a bit”—but she refuses. He thinks she’s afraid of the trick when the truth is that she could give him an hour-long tutorial on P. T. Selbit and his misogynistic inventions: Destroying a Girl, Stretching a Lady, Crushing a Woman, all of them perfectly timed to capitalize on postwar bloodthirst and women’s suffrage.”
― Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists

“Once, long ago, Dory and her infant daughter were riding a bus in the city, when an old woman leaned over and said, “May I tell you something, dear?” She had a kind face full of valleys and faults. Dory imagined she was about to describe the baby’s beauty—in particular, the curve of the mouth—and she made her own mouth assume a knowing, pleased modesty. But what the woman said, leaning even closer, was, “You will never have another day in your life that is free of anxiety.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Uncoupling: A Novel