Lauren

“Turns out the sadness that silence from the person you love brings can be temporarily erased by the dull thrill of attention from strangers.”
― Candice Carty-Williams, Queenie

“Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person -- sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty -- and you get to pick three of those things. The rest you have to look for elsewhere. It's only in the movies that you find someone who gives you all those things. But this isn't the movies. In the real world, you have to identify which three qualities you want to spend the rest of your life with, and then you look for those qualities in another person. That's real life. Don't you see it's a trap? If you keep trying to find everything, you'll wind up with nothing.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“He didn't belong to you...You keep talking as if he belonged to you, just because you were his mother, but he didn't.

He didn't belong to anybody but himself.”
― Akwaeke Emezi, The Death of Vivek Oji

“Choices, numberless as grains of sand, had layered and compressed, coalescing into sediment, then into rock, until all was set in stone.”
― Tara Westover, Educated