Juliana

“I can’t lose the thing I’ve held onto for so long, you know?” My face twists up from the pain of pushing it out. “I just really need it to be a love story, you know? I really, really need it to be that.”
“I know,” she says.
“Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it”? I look to her glassy eyes, her face of wide open empathy. “It’s my life,” I say. “This has been my whole life.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“No really it's for a man who's thinking of committing suicide he was held hostage and tortured and it haunts him and I thought maybe just maybe The Importance of Being Ernest would do the trick because when my mother feels depressed it cheers her up to walk on the Wilde side.”
― Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

“Actually, her unexpected widowhood made Nettie safely pathetic and safely other. It was as though she had been trying, long before her husband died, to let my mother know that she was disenfranchised in a way Mama could never be, perched only temporarily on a landscape Mama was entrenched in, and when Rick obligingly got himself killed this deeper truth became apparent. My mother could now sustain Nettie’s beauty without becoming unbalanced, and Nettie could help herself to Mama’s respectability without being humbled.”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

“All traffic with the brains drowned realm is sorcery: Our bards, salvaging notions from their minds to plant in those of others, where they grow to splendours, else atrocities”
― Alan Moore, From Hell