Alexandra

“She must stay polite, and wield that politeness like a finely knapped glassknife. She must be cold and calm in her anger, lest a lack of self-control be dismissed as the mark of monstrosity.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season

“There are days my life snags on and I keep circling back to them. These are the roots of all I do, and if an observer were to lay those days lodged in my memory over the surface of my present, perhaps all my life would be explained, all problems solved, all wounds revealed.”
― Barney Norris, Turning for Home

“I could go even further now I’ve started, try to really show her the way I feel, wake her up to what I’ve been through, and tell her my favourite image of what anorexia is like, the final image of Primo Levi’s book The Truce, which I read while I was still in the hospital, ghoulishly devouring tales of Auschwitz because they reminded me a little of myself and hoping none of the nurses would “work out what I was reading. At the end of The Truce, Levi spoke of the morning call at Auschwitz that woke him every day, the cry of ‘Wstawàch’, ‘Get up.’ And he finished by saying he didn’t believe he’d heard it for the last time. He believed that a truce had been called, but it wouldn’t last for ever. And a day would come when he would be lying in bed, and the sound would reach his ears again. The sound of a German voice outside his window calling ‘Get up,’ and the nightmare starting again. That’s what anorexia is like sometimes. I can understand why Levi ended up throwing himself down a stairwell to his death. I can imagine he must have heard the call again. I know what that’s like, to wait for the voice that will summon you home into suffering.”
― Barney Norris, Turning for Home

“Sometimes it felt like Zoe was just waiting out her life now, enduring it, ticking off events and days and months and years, as if she just had to get herself through something unspecified and then things would be better, except she never got through it and it never got better and she would never forgive him. His death was the ultimate 'fuck you'.”
― Liane Moriarty, Summary of Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty: Conversation Starters