Jessica

“Poor Sasha. Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of love. How badly they need it, and how little most of them will ever get. The treacled pop songs, the dresses described in the catalogs with words like 'sunset' and 'Paris.' Then the dreams are taken away with such violent force; the hand wrenching the buttons of the jeans, nobody looking at the man shouting at his girlfriend on the bus”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its waverings, its pacings back and forth, its disastrous retreats! Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances. There are people who say that intelligence must have built the universe - why, intelligence never built a steam-engine! Circumstances built a steam-engine. Intelligence is little more than a short foot-rule by which we measure the infinite achievements of Circumstances.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“There's no substitute for will. Sometimes you have to fake will when you don't feel it at all.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Love of the Last Tycoon

“They were smiling at each other as if this was the beginning of the world.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon