Julia ☆

“The whole time we were together, why didn't you tell me any of this?

I don't know. I suppose I didn't want you to think I was damaged or something. I was probably afraid you didn't want me anymore.

Finally he puts his face in his hands. His fingers feel cold and clammy on his eyelids and there are tears in his eyes. The harder he presses with his fingers, the faster the tears seep out, wet, onto his skin. Jesus, he says. His voice sounds thick and he clears his throat. Come here, he says. And she comes to him. He feels terribly ashamed and confused. They lie face-to-face and he puts his arms around her body. In her ear he says: I'm sorry, okay? She holds onto him tightly, her arms winding around him, and he kisses her forehead.
But he always thought she was damaged, he thought it anyway.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn't chosen.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“they were attended only by people who wanted to be the kind of people who attended them”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People