Arianna

“I tell myself that I want to live a happy life, and that the circumstances for happiness just haven't arisen. But what if that's not true? What if I'm the one who can't let myself be happy? Because I'm scared, or I prefer to wallow in self-pity, or I don't believe I deserve good things, or some other reason. Whenever something good happens to me I always find myself thinking: I wonder how long it will be until this turns out badly. And I almost want the worst to happen sooner, sooner rather than later, and if possibile straight away, so at least I don't have to feel anxious about it anymore.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“Jane started say­ing ‘Wel­come to be­ing in a re­la­tion­ship’ to me over and over again.

I’d tell her about all the com­pro­mises I was mak­ing and how much Andy’s self-ab­sorp­tion could ir­ri­tate me and how I’d no­ticed that he’d stopped find­ing me sexy and started find­ing me sweet – that he used to grab my bum and kiss me, and now he kissed me on the head and pulled the zip­per of my jacket up and down in a cutesy way. ‘Wait till he stops find­ing you sweet,’ she said. ‘That’s a whole other phase.’

I told her about how much time was spent com­fort­ing him and buoy­ing him up and get­ting him out of low moods. How his emo­tions were al­ways more im­por­tant than mine – that when we had arguments, his feel­ings were dis­cussed as facts and mine were in­ter­ro­gated as fab­ri­ca­tions. ‘Jen,’ she said mat­ter-of-factly, ‘do you even want a boyfriend?’

I asked her if this was all stuff she put up with and she nod­ded. ‘Wel­come to be­ing in a re­la­tion­ship,’ she said.

And I thought: I don’t want to be wel­come here. I don’t want to get com­fort­able here.”
― Dolly Alderton, Good Material

“But maybe it's not easy at all—maybe to weep and prostrate ourselves with genuine sincerity is the hardest thing we could ever learn how to do. I feel certain I don't understand how to do it. I have that resistance in me, that hard little kernel of something, which I fear would not let me prostrate myself before God even if I believed in him.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You