Angela

“Don’t you see? We create our own thorns, and never stop to count the cost. All we can do is suffer the pain, and tell ourselves it was well worth it.’ ‘That’s what I don’t understand. The pain.’ He glanced down at her hand, so gently on his arm, hurting him so unbearably. ‘Why the pain, Meggie?’ ‘Ask God, Ralph,’ said Meggie. ‘He’s the authority on pain, isn’t He? He made us what we are, He made the whole world. Therefore He made the pain, too.”
― Colleen McCullough, The Thorn Birds

“I miss her the way I missed our loft after we moved in seventh grade: sharply, and then not at all. There is too much unpacking to do.”
― Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"

“When someone shows you how little you mean to them and you keep coming back for more, before you know it you start to mean less to yourself. You are not made up of compartments! You are one whole person! What gets said to you gets said to all of you, ditto what gets done. Being treated like shit is not an amusing game or a transgressive intellectual experiment. It’s something you accept, condone, and learn to believe you deserve. This is so simple. But I tried so hard to make it complicated.”
― Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A young woman tells you what she's "learned"

“There is a legend about a bird which sings only once in it's life, more beautifully than any other creature on the face of the earth. From the moment it leaves it's nest, it searches for a thorn tree, and does not rest until it has found one. Then, it impales it's breast on the longest, sharpest thorn. But as it is dying, it rises above it's own agony to outsing the Lark and the Nightingale. The Thornbird pays it's life for that one song, and the whole world stills to listen, and God in his heaven smiles, as it's best is brought only at the cost of great pain; Driven to the thorn with no knowledge of the dying to come. But when we press the thorn to our breast, we know, we understand.... and still, we do it." ~ Colleen McCullough”
― Colleen McCullough, The Thorn Birds