Autumn

“As an evangelical teenager, I didn't trust my own mind, too afraid to sin. Straying too far away from the early Christian internet could lead to temptation, to lust, to anger, to doubt. Perpetually aware of my own failings and ever the budding perfectionist, I aspired to a nearly ascetic level of spiritual self-discipline, which was in fact self-denial. I believe that I had chosen my faith for myself, not realizing that I had been conditioned all my life to be the ideal, obedient subject.”
― Jeanna Kadlec, Heretic: A Memoir

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“Instead of the word 'love' there was an enormous heart, a symbol sometimes used by people who have trouble figuring out the difference between words and shapes.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Carnivorous Carnival

“She says she can’t talk,” Svetlana told me. “She’s a botanist her name is Fernanda, so of course her nickname is Fern. It suits her because ferns are so mysterious and sort of elusive and ferns can survive anywhere.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot