Helen

“I am in pieces.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“Gentlemen are rare. They're like virgins or leprechauns.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“Ever since, I’ve been looking everywhere for parents, in my lovers, in my friends, and it’s all right with me to have nothing of my own — not any plans and not any worries. I like this kind of life, it’s terrible but true. I don’t know why it is, but the moment I wake up something in me feels things are going right.”
― Françoise Sagan, That Mad Ache: A Novel

“I'm convinced that this anxiety running through my life is the tension between what I "should be" and what i am. My anxiety doesn't come from thinking about the future but from wanting to control it. It seems to begin whenever I smuggle into my mind an expectation about how I or others should be. It is the tension between my desire to control the world and the recognition that I can't. "I will be what I will be" - where is the anxiety in that ? Anxiety is the recognition that I might not reach the rung on the opinion ladder I have just set for my self. I fear death most when I am about to exceed what I believe others think of me; then death threatens to cut me off from myself, because "myself" is not yet.”
― Hugh Prather, Notes to Myself