marilou

“With my eyes closed, I heard him say, I don't love you anymore...I could hear the words but I couldn't quite access them, couldn't quite accept that it was me living my life at that moment. Surely he was telling this to someone else, surely we would be together forever, the way we'd talked about. This was before I needed passion and wildness and to be on the verge of every emotion at once—I wanted safety and beauty, and he looked like Bob Dylan in the middle of the desert, and I thought that was what the love of my life could be.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“The Uncertainty Principle states that you can know where a particle is, or you can know where it's going, but you can't know both at the same time. The same, it turns out, is true of people. And when you try, when you look too closely, you get the Observer Effect. By trying to work out what's going on, you're interfering with destiny. A particle can be in two places at once. A particle can interfere with its own past. It can have multiple futures, and multiple pasts. The universe is complicated.”
― Harriet Reuter Hapgood, The Square Root of Summer

“Was I kind to others? It was hard to nail down an answer. I worried that if I did turn out to have a personality, it would be one of the unkind ones. Did I only worry about this question because as a woman I felt required to put the needs of others before my own? Was “kindness” just another term for submission in the face of conflict? These were the kind of things I wrote about in my diary as a teenager: as a feminist I have the right not to love anyone.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“You keep describing yourself as this uniquely damaged person, when a lot of it is completely normal. I think you want to feel special - which is fair, who doesn’t - but you won’t allow yourself to feel special in a good way, so you tell yourself you’re especially bad”
― Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times