Mnrupe

“if you want to enjoy the rewards of being loved, you also have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.”
― Tim Kreider, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You: Essays

“A mandarin fell in love with a courtesan. 'I shall be yours,' she told him, 'when you have spent a hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool, in my garden, beneath my window.' But on the ninety-ninth night, the mandarin stood up, put his stool under his arm, and went away.”
― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“Love has two affirmations. First of all, when the lover encounters the other, there is an immediate affirmation (psychologically: dazzlement, enthusiasm, exaltation, mad projection of a fulfilled future: I am devoured by desire, the impulse to be happy): I say yes to everything (blinding myself). There follows a long tunnel: my first yes is riddled by doubts, love’s value is ceaselessly threatened by depreciation: this is the moment of melancholy passion, the rising of resentment and oblation. Yet I can emerge from this tunnel; I can ‘surmount,’ without liquidating; what I have affirmed a first time, I can once again affirm, without repeating it, for then what I affirm is the affirmation, not its contingency. I affirm the first encounter in its difference, I desire its return, not its repetition. I say to the other (old or new): Let us begin again.”
― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“What does it say about our culture that the desire for weight loss is considered a default feature of womanhood?”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body