Alexander

“Back when Harris and I slept together I would often whisper, Let’s dream the same dream, right after we turned out the lights. He took it as a sweet sign-off, but I yearned for this joint dream so hard my teeth hurt. He didn’t understand that you could create a world—a fantasy, a nightmare—and bring other people into it, not just artistically but in life. I was pretty good at getting people to meet me in my mind, but ultimately no one wanted to stay there.”
― Miranda July, All Fours

“Masking is when I have to pass as a neurotypical person, as someone who is not like me. I have to ignore the need to stim, to self-soothe, and I have to make firm eye contact. Keedie told me it’s like when superheroes have to pretend that they’re regular people.”
― Elle McNicoll, A Kind of Spark

“We have so many elections,” Gitanas said”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“So why did I do it? I ask myself. Why did I do it? I had to live somewhere. You have to live somewhere. This is the awful truth, the latest increment of the immense fund of wisdom that I have been building up over the years. You have to live somewhere. Wherever you are, you have to live somewhere. And not Rome, I decided. Oh, I got into a terrible state there. The winter was cold and Rome is one of the worst places to be when it is cold. We were cold at home, cold in cafés, cold in pizzerias and cold on the buses we were forced to take because it was too cold to be on the moped. Staying in was cold, going out was colder. It was uncharacteristically cold, apparently. This is how Romans cope with the cold: every year everyone declares ‘it never gets this cold’ and in this way, even though it gets this cold every year, enough rhetorical heat is generated to get through the unseasonably seasonable cold. You are better off in a seriously cold place like England.”
― Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence