Rosie

“The housing stock along the broad Edinburgh Road was a linear map of a century of social housing, from scrubby squares of muddy grass around garden city dreams, to high-rise machines for living. Occasionally they passed a wall of undemolished tenements, the old housing design that had worked in the city for centuries.”
― Denise Mina, The Dead Hour

“His eagerness, his deep kindness, these were the benefits of his privilege. This peaceful sleep of being born male and rich and white and American and at this prosperous time, when the wars that were happening were far from home. This boy, told from the first moment he was born that he could do what he wanted. All he needed was to try. Mess up over and over, and everyone would wait until he got it right.”
― Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

“Envy is the religion of the mediocre. It comforts them, it soothes their worries, and finally it rots their souls, allowing them to justify their meanness and their greed until they believe these to be virtues. Such people are convinced that the doors of heaven will be opened only to poor wretches like themselves who go through life without leaving any trace but their threadbare attempts to belittle others and to exclude—and destroy if possible—those who, by the simple fact of their existence, show up their own poorness of spirit, mind, and guts. Blessed be the one at whom the fools bark, because his soul will never belong to them.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

“I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time.”
― Iris Murdoch