VEILAH

“My heart lurches, as if it wants to leave my awful body and go make a home in her.”
― Chloe Michelle Howarth, Sunburn

“I can see now, and I sensed then, though I tried to ignore it, that I was bored, and that without the cards, the beer, and the chips I would not have known what to do with him, that these things were a distraction from the emptiness that would have been there in the room between us, they were a distraction I had to have in order to want to stay there with him at all and not prefer to be at home alone eating and reading and more fully engrossed in that than I could be in him.”
― Lydia Davis

“On cloudless mornings, when she is gardening, she is sometimes seized by the desire to “leave everything and go away,” she told me. She doesn’t want to see a computer or stove. She feels she has too many clothes and wants to give them to others. One morning, she was on her terrace and felt herself melting. “I had an immense urge to jump off and mingle with the sky,” she said. “It is a very expansive, loving feeling. In that space, you can allow anything to come in and occupy you. The only thought that finally drew me back was: I have a daughter. And I am not going to do to her what my mom did.”
― Rachel Aviv, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

“While narcissistic people will expect you to honor their boundaries, they will not respect yours.”
― Ramani Durvasula, It's Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People