Cocoa Laney

“What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body. It advances, is what I’m trying to say, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“Hope just means another world might be possible, not promise, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power

“The fact that everything feels like God to me ensured that I would not remain a Christian.”
― Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

“The default assumption tends to be that it is politically important to designate everyone as beautiful, that it is a meaningful project to make sure that everyone can become, and feel, increasingly beautiful. We have hardly tried to imagine what it might look like if our culture could do the opposite—de-escalate the situation, make beauty matter less.”
― Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion