NicoleR

“You know what, sometimes it seems to me we're living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what's good and what isn't, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves... And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“Creating is more than fun—it is total and complete absorption.”
― Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

“The enormous difference between the relationships you need, and the one you deeply want. The need is created out of an accumulation of negativities, planted by traumatic experiences: fear, doubts, anxiety, dependence, weakness in certain realms, inadequacy, incompleteness. A certain relationship can remove the fear, calm anxiety, supply a certain completion, replace a loss, fulfill an organic insufficiency, lull an insecurity, supply a substitute love.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume 3: 1939-1944

“perhaps solitude has stretched out his thoughts into long strands, and accustomed him to internal dialogues.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights