Stephanie

“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

“All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other.”
― Ali Smith, How to be Both

“If I'd had a friend next to me, I would have squeezed her arm and said, Can you believe this? - but kitsch wasn't kitsch if you were alone.”
― Emma Straub, Other People We Married

“So much of the pain of loneliness is to do with concealment, with feeling compelled to hide vulnerability, to tuck ugliness away, to cover up scars as if they are literally repulsive. But why hide? What's so shameful about wanting, about desire, about having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness? Why this need to constantly inhabit peak states, or to be comfortably sealed inside a unit of two, turned inward from the world at large?”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone