Merra

“It was some time ago that you talked about it, and you never once noticed that every time you mentioned her name it went through me like a knife, like an electric shock, and that I struck back, not always according to the rules, but I really wanted it to hurt. Why did you think I did that? Because I felt shamed by her? Or guilty? Why did every mention of her name drive me almost mad?”
― Magda Szabó, The Fawn

“I like people who've seen some darkness
The haunted ones.
I like people who don't claim to know what love is
The honest ones.”
― Florence Welch, Useless Magic: Lyrics and Poetry

“Naturally I feel no shame in writing these things because of the time which separates the moment when they are written--when only I can see them--from the moment when they will be read by other people, a moment which I feel will never come. By then I could have had an accident or died; a war or a revolution could have broken out. This delay makes it possible for me to write today, in the same way I used to lie in the scorching sun for a whole day at sixteen, or make love wihout contraceptives at twenty: without thinking about the consequences”
― Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

“Nobody when they're rejected believes it's really for extraneous reasons. And it almost never is for extraneous reasons, because mutual attraction — which even makes sense from an evolutionary perspective — is simply the strangest reason to do anything, overriding all the contrary principles and making them fall away into nothing.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo