Anjali

“At times I think of human relationships as something soft like sand or water, and by pouring them into particular vessels we give them shape. So a mother’s relationship with her daughter is poured into a vessel marked ‘mother and child’, and the relationship takes the contours of its container and is held inside there, for better or worse. Maybe some unhappy friends would have been perfectly contented as sisters, or married couples as parents and children, who knows. But what would it be like to form a relationship with no preordained shape of any kind? Just to pour the water out and let it fall. I suppose it would take no shape, and run off in all directions. That’s a little like myself and Felix, I think. There is no obvious path forward by which any relation between us can proceed. I don’t believe he would describe me as a friend, because he has friends, and the way he relates to them is different from the way he relates to me.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“The wretched people around us do not see what a man has. They only see what he does not have.”
― Perumal Murugan, One Part Woman

“It is the misanthrope who alone has clarity.By standing outside the huddles of man,he sees a lot,and what he often sees is the evidence that people are not as smart as dogs think they are.And he wants to see it time and again.In the fog of ambiguities and mysteries,he desperately searches for truths because truth usually shows humanity in a poor light”
― Manu Joseph, The Illicit Happiness of Other People

“The task of young people is to understand themselves, to observe the world around them, and to determine what kind of adults they wish to be. No one achieves that without making mistakes.”
― Wendy Zomparelli, A Life of Her Own: The Story of Margaret Dashwood