Lilly

“Jeanette, will you tell me why?’ ‘What why?’ ‘You know what why . . .’ But I don’t know what why . . . what I am . . . why I don’t please her. What she wants. Why I am not what she wants. What I want or why. But there is something I know: ‘When I am with her I am happy. Just happy.’ She nodded. She seemed to understand and I thought, really, for that second, that she would change her mind, that we would talk, that we would be on the same side of the glass wall. I waited. She said, ‘Why be happy when you could be normal?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“Journeys end in lovers meeting; I have spent an all but sleepless night, I have told lies and made a fool of myself, and the very air tastes like wine. I have been frightened half out of my foolish wits, but I have somehow earned this joy; I have been waiting for it for so long.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“I had a sense of myself as a haunted house. I never knew when the invisible thing would strike – and it was like a blow, a kind of winding in the chest or stomach. When I felt it I would cry out at the force of it. Sometimes I lay curled up on the floor. Sometimes I kneeled and gripped a piece of furniture. This is one moment . . . know that another . . . Hold on, hold on, hold on.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“Nothing irrevocable had yet been spoken, but there was only the barest margin of safety left them, each of them moving delicately along the outskirts of an open question, and, once spoken, such a question-as "Do you love me?" -could never be answered or forgotten. They walked slowly, meditating, wondering, and the path sloped down from their feet and they followed, walking side by side in the most extreme intimacy of expectation; their feinting and hesitation done with, they could only await passively for resolution. Each knew, almost within a breath, what the other was thinking and wanting to say; each of them almost wept for the other. They perceived at the same moment the change in the path and each knew then the other's knowledge of it; Theodora took Eleanor's arm and, afraid to stop, they moved on slowly, close together, and ahead of them the path widened and blackened and curved.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House