Bella (bookcabinets)

“It is so mysterious to want to suppress women. It is even more mysterious when women want to suppress women. I can only think we are so very powerful that we need to be suppressed all the time.”
― Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living

“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

“And yet, accepting the premise, allowing life to mean nothing for a moment, doesn’t it simply feel good”
― 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