Stephanie

“There were so many different moods and impressions that he wished to express in verse. He felt them within him. He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet's soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy.”
― James Joyce, Dubliners

“I found that sometimes it was a relief to do something unattractive in private, to confirm that I’m deeply flawed when so many others imagine me to be perfect. People are often startled by my handwriting; because I’m pretty, they assume everything I do is pretty. It’s odd to them that I write like I have a hook for an arm, just as Ford would be startled to learn I have a hook for a heart.”
― Alissa Nutting, Tampa

“Nevertheless, we cannot escape the suspicion that individuality might be inhibited by marriage, and we wonder whether people in open relationships might not really be braver than the rest - as if freedom were ultimately a matter of courage, of irreverence and honesty, of rebelliousness.”
― Daniel Bullen, Love Lives of the Artists: Five Stories of Creative Intimacy

“Speech failures, communication breakdowns, misunderstandings, mishearings, episodes of muteness, stuttering and stammering, word forgetfulness, even the inability to grasp a joke: all these things invoke loneliness, forcing a reminder of the precarious, imperfect means by which we express our interiors to others. They undermine our footing in the social, casting us as outsiders, poor or non-participants.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone