Amy

“this is the highest point in leningrad" he taps. "with the very best view."
"these are windowless rooms," I point out. "in a cellar."
"yet from here i see the kingdom of heaven”
― Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno

“He reaches for her hand and she gives it to him without thinking. For a second he holds it, his thumb moving over her knuckles. Then he lifts her hand to his mouth and kisses it. She feels pleasurably crushed under the weight of his power over her, the vast ecstatic depth of her will to please him. That’s nice, she says. He nods. She feels a low gratifying ache inside her body, in her pelvic bone, in her back.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“There is a notion out there that black people enjoy the Sisyphean struggle against racism. In fact, most of us live for the day when we can struggle against anything else. But having been, by that very racism, pinned into ghettoes, both metaphorical and real, our options for struggle are chosen long before we are born. And so we struggle out of fear for our children. We struggle out of fear for ourselves. We struggle to avoid our feelings, because to actually consider all that was taken, to understand that it was taken systematically, that the taking is essential to America and echoes down through the ages, could make you crazy.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

“In the spring he would sometimes wake up at night beside Marianne, and if she was awake too they would move into each other’s arms until he could feel himself inside her. He didn’t have to say anything, except to ask her if it was alright and she always said it was. Nothing else in his life compared to what he felt then. Often he wished he could fall asleep inside her body.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People