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“feeling my tongue exult in flights by which experience might vault beyond the mind, become an externality.”
― Maggie Millner, Couplets

“I waited to be told what was good about me. All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you—the boys had spent that time becoming themselves.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“if we have to go to our deaths for the greater good of humankind, I will accept that like a lamb, because I haven’t deserved this life or even enjoyed it. But I would like to be helpful in some way to the project, whatever it is, and if I could help only in a very small way, I wouldn’t mind, because I would be acting in my own self-interest anyway—because it’s also ourselves we’re brutalising, though in another way, of course. No one wants to live like this. Or at least, I don’t want to live like this. I want to live differently, or if necessary to die so that other people can one day live differently.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“Whatever I can do, whatever insignificant talent I might have, people just expect me to sell it—I mean literally, sell it for money, until I have a lot of money and no talent left. And then that’s it, I’m finished, and the next flashy twenty-five-year-old with an impending psychological collapse comes along. If I have met anyone genuine along the way, then they’ve been so well disguised in the teeming crowd of bloodthirsty egomaniacs that I
haven’t recognized them.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You