nina

“It's not so much time is circular as time
confuses memory with hope and fear
which often looks like the future”
― Jennifer Nelson

“You wondered, when she came along, if this was what most people got to experience in their lives: a straight line from want to satisfaction; desire manifested and satisfied in reasonable succession. This had never been the case before; it had always been fraught. How many times had you said, 'If I just looked a little different, I'd be drowning in love'? Now you got to drown without needing to change a single cell. Lucky you.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“My loneliness, my sleepless darling
reminds herself
the fruit that falls increases
at the speed of the body rising to meet it.”
― Li-Young Lee, Book of My Nights: Poems

“Literary work couldn't seriously force the whirlpool of debris that constituted the real into any grammatical or syntactical order.”
― Elena Ferrante, In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing