Caroline

“People who have met both my father and me say that I am just like him. We share this explosive passive-aggressive dance, a sort of social bulimia, in which we simultaneously try to connect with someone (because we’re lonely) and at the same time send the message that this person is UNDER NO OBLIGATION TO US WHATSOEVER. As I wave to you, I’m backing up. When I hand you a Christmas gift, I shout, “Feel free to regift or sell!” I sit down to talk with you at a party and either monologue my current act for forty-five minutes or s-l-o-w-l-y inch my way farther and farther away while lobbing a barrage of questions over an impenetrable wall of anxiety.”
― Maria Bamford, Sure, I'll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”
― Albert Camus

“Life is a struggle and a good spy goes in there and fights.”
― Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy

“I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?”
― Voltaire, Candide, or, Optimism