Monisha

“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

“Quantum mechanics extends this relativity in a radical way: all variable aspects of an object exist only in relation to other objects. It is only in interactions that nature draws the world.”
― Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity

“There’s something frightening about her, some huge emptiness in the pit of her being. It’s like waiting for a lift to arrive and when the doors open nothing is there, just the terrible dark emptiness of the elevator shaft, on and on forever. She’s missing some primal instinct, self-defence or self-preservation, which makes other human beings comprehensible. You lean in expecting resistance, and everything just falls away in front of you.”
― Salley Rooney

“It is an inevitability that masquerades as a decision. That is the way of a drunkard.”
― Manu Joseph, The Illicit Happiness of Other People