M..

“I hated the idea that he knew everything about me while I knew little or nothing of him. I felt like someone who is blind and knows that he is being observed by the very people he would like to spy on in every detail.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know what despair is; then
winter should have meaning for you.
I did not expect to survive, earth suppressing me. I didn't expect to waken again, to feel in damp earth my body able to respond again, remembering after so long how to open again in the cold light . of earliest spring—
afraid, yes, but among you again crying yes risk joy
in the raw wind of the new world.”
― The Wild Iris by Louise Glück

“The whole future---I thought---will be that way, life lives together with the damp odor of the land of the dead, attention with inattention, passionate leaps of the heart along with abrupt losses of meaning.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“Grief felt fourth-dimensional, abstract, faintly familiar. I was cold.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers