Annika

“He feels, as he increasingly does, that his life is something that has happened to him, rather than something he has had any role in creating. He has never been able to imagine what his life might be; even as a child, even as he dreamed of other places, of other lives, he wasn’t able to visualize what those other places and lives would be; he had believed everything he had been taught about who he was and what he would become. But his friends, Ana, Lucien, Harold and Julia: They had imagined his life for him. They had seen him as something different than he had ever seen himself as; they had allowed him to believe in possibilities that he would never have conceived. He saw his life as the axiom of equality, but they saw it as another riddle, one with no name—Jude = x—and they had filled in the x in ways Brother Luke, the counselors at the home, Dr. Traylor had never written for him or encouraged him to write for himself. He wishes he could believe their proofs the way they do; he wishes they had shown him how they had arrived at their solutions.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“My sweetheart," Harold says again, and he wants him to stop; he wants him to never stop. "My baby." And he cries and cries, cries for everything he has been, for everything he might have been, for every old hurt, for every old happiness, cries for the shame and joy of finally getting to be a child, with all of a child's whims and wants and insecurities, for the privilege of behaving badly and being forgiven, for the luxury of tendernesses, of fondnesses, of being served a meal and being made to eat it, for the ability, at last, at last, of believing a parent's reassurances, of believing that to someone he is special despite all his mistakes and hatefulness, because of all his mistakes and hatefulness.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“I just don't want people to be scared of her," her sister had said when they first received the diagnosis, but now that the baby was here the whole family had turned to a huge blue defiant stare that moved as a part through the waves, with the fear of the world curling tall on either side of them. They wanted - what? - to take the sun by the face and force it down: Look at her! Look! Shine on her! Shine! Shine!”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“His silence had begun as something protective, but over the years it has transformed into something near oppressive, something that manages him rather than the other way around. Now he cannot find a way out of it, even when he wants to. He imagines he is floating in a small bubble of water, encased on all sides by walls and ceilings and floors of ice, all many feet thick. He knows there is a way out, but he is unequipped; he has no tools to begin his work, and his hands scrabble uselessly against the ice's slick. He had thought that by not saying who he was, he was making himself more palatable, less strange. But now, what he doesn't say makes him stranger, an object of pity and even suspicion.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life