Bella (bookcabinets)

“To separate from love is to live a risk-free life. What’s the point of that sort of life? As I wheeled my electric bike through the park on the way to my writing shed, my hands had turned blue from the cold. I had given up wearing gloves because I was always grappling in the dark for keys. I stopped by the fountain, only to find it had been switched off. A sign from the council read, This fountain has been winterized. I reckoned that is what had happened to me too.”
― Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography

“Making new friends as an adult is as nerve-racking as asking someone on a date.”
― Rachel Winters, Would Like to Meet

“How often in life he has found himself a frustrated observer of apparently impenetrable systems, watching other people participate effortlessly in structures he can find no way to enter or even understand. So often that it’s practically baseline, just normal existence for him. And this is not only due to the irrational nature of other people, and the consequent irrationality of the rules and processes they devise; it’s due to Ivan himself, his fundamental unsuitedness to life. He knows this. He feels himself to have been formed, somehow, with something other than life in mind.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“Nobody when they're rejected believes it's really for extraneous reasons. And it almost never is for extraneous reasons, because mutual attraction — which even makes sense from an evolutionary perspective — is simply the strangest reason to do anything, overriding all the contrary principles and making them fall away into nothing.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo