Shelby

“Turning I would to I did is the grammar of growing up.”
― Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno

“The portrait artist must acknowledge human complexity with each brushstroke. The eyes, nose and mouth that compose a sitter's face, just like the suffering and joy that compose his soul, are similar to those of ten million others yet still singular to him. This acknowledgment is where art begins. It may also be where mercy begins. If criminals drew the faces of their victims before perpetrating their crimes and judges drew the faces of the guilty before sentencing them, then there would be no faces for executioners to draw.”
― Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno

“It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“To be a white middle-class child in a small southern town must be on certain levels the most golden way for a child to live in the United States.”
― Joan Didion, South and West: From a Notebook