Bourbon_bookworm

“...Anyway I hate nature,' she said. It was one of her favorite outrageous claims. That she detested the mess of nature. That it was always preferable to paint lily or wild rose in the studio. The freedom to create a bouquet of flowers that bloomed in different months was her justification. The second was that an arrangement and vase implied a human presence even if not visible in the painting. To her that particular human, who didn't appear on canvas, was her true subject.”
― Victoria Redel, I Am You

“Who among us comes through life without regret? Without apology? How often do we create the fire we must step into and hopefully through? And if we are lucky emerge charred, we must then survive coarsely scarred and patched. And still longing. That's love. Difficult to reckon that something so burnt and crusted with anger and hurt can still be called love.”
― Victoria Redel, I Am You

“Once I stopped being angry, I’d have to start being sad. I wanted to feel only that my friends were terrible, careless people. I knew that they loved me. People who love you do not, however, exclusively behave in your best interest. Still, in the whole time we’d been friends, none of us had ever acted with the express purpose of hurting each other.”
― Sonia Feldman, Girl's Girl

“But if you've never cared enduringly for another, than I can't suppose you know the ways love can also be stingy and mean.”
― Victoria Redel, I Am You