Natalie

“You boys know what tropism is, it’s what makes a plant grow toward the light. Everything aspires to the light. You don’t have to chase down a fly to get rid of it—you just darken the room, leave a crack of light in a window, and out he goes. Works every time. We all have that instinct, that aspiration. Science can’t—what was your word? dim?—science can’t dim that. All science can do is turn out the false lights so the true light can get us home.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

“Books, I realized, are connected to one another via nearly invisible superhighways of language, the way stars are interrelated via light and dust, the debris of the universe.”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra: A Coming-of-Age Journey Across the Mediterranean

“Figuring out how to “get better” at being a woman is a ridiculous and often amoral project—a subset of the larger, equally ridiculous, equally amoral project of learning to get better at life under accelerated capitalism. In these pursuits, most pleasures end up being traps, and every public-facing demand escalates in perpetuity. Satisfaction remains, under the terms of the system, necessarily out of reach.”
― Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror

“When she was twelve, she had walked from her house to the market with a short list from her mother and it had been peaceful. When she was thirteen, every pickup blew its horn. The drivers whistled. One year, you’re a kid with a carton of milk; the next, you are a body, visible to everyone.”
― Ramona Ausubel, Awayland