Ria

“I like the jellyfish because it has no brain or heart. It’s just a thing that takes in the ocean through its mouth. I like that kind of ambition and simplicity.”
― Sheila Heti, Women in Clothes

“And the violence we will reap,
Is bred from the anger we sow.”
― William Martin

“We had always talked easily and well, and as we carried our drinks away, I asked him what he thought there was in us that forced us to tell stories to ourselves about our own lives - to make up stories that had such an arbitrary resemblance to our actual living. Why did we pick certain dots and connect them and not others? Why did we find it so irresistible to make ourselves into tragic figures with tragic flaws which were responsible for our pain? Maybe unfortunate things just happened; maybe there was just bad luck. Why did it seem like our greatest failures were caused by perversions in our souls?

'Perhaps it's evolutionary,' he said. ' If we saw ourselves in realistic proportions - how tiny we are, and how little ability we have to avoid the suffering that's an inevitable part of life - maybe we would be too discouraged to survive.'

'Or maybe,' I said, 'the truth is so diffuse that our minds cannot even hold on to it.”
― Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?

“My point is, it takes a special person to cry over a book. It shows compassion as well as imagination...Don't ever lose that”
― Alex Gino, Melissa