Wren

“What I wanted, more than anything, was some uninterrupted crying time. I had a screaming need to be alone. I did not say this to Lily, I told her I needed to write a book. Which, when you think about it, is probably code for the same thing.”
― Anne Enright, The Wren, the Wren

“In the desire to be respected, people become ableist and prejudiced, straining to present ourselves as happy and healthy when it should be fine to be ace and unhappy and unhealthy, like all the unhappy and unhealthy straight people out there.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“The result: None of the kids, even the “sugar-sensitive” ones, showed any meaningful differences after following each diet. “Even when the intake exceeds typical dietary levels, neither dietary sucrose nor aspartame affects children’s behavior or cognitive function,” the researchers concluded. The “sugar high” had been officially debunked. The 1994 results have been replicated in several subsequent studies and yet—I’ve never attended a child’s birthday party where someone didn’t invoke the specter of the sugar high as soon as the cake is cut.”
― Virginia Sole-Smith, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture

“She gathered the little cards together with an automatic hand. That was the phrase that came to her, as if her hand were purely mechanical, not alive at all, as if the messages from her skin and her nerves were changes in the anbaric current along a copper wire, not anything conscious. With that vision of her body as something dead and mechanical came a sense of listless desolation. She felt not only as if she were dead now, but that she’d always been dead, and had only dreamed of being alive, and that there was no life in the dream either: it was only the meaningless and indifferent jostling of particles in her brain, and nothing more.
But that little chain of ideas provoked a spasm of reaction, and she thought, No! That’s a lie! That’s slander! I don’t believe it!
Except that she did believe it, just then, and it was killing her.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth