Sarah

“And there was something that frightened me much more. If I went to the doctor's tomorrow, and was cured by, say, the weekend, there'd be no relief from anxiety, just different anxiety. Even as the antibiotics hosed down my genitals, the mind's bacteria would be forming new armies. I'd come up with something to get me down...

Was this the case with everyone -- everyone, that is, who wasn't already a thalidomide baked-bean, or a gangrenous imbecile, or degradingly poor, or irretrievably ugly, and would therefore have pretty obvious targets for their worries? If so, the notion of 'having problems' -- or 'having a harder life than most people', or 'having a harder life than you usually had' -- was spurious. You don't have problems, only a capacity for feeling anxious about them, which shifts and jostles but doesn't change.”
― Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers

“I told him I hadn't seen Thurston since a week before we left the States. I said he had no idea where I was, and I had no way of finding him either.

"We fell out," I said. "I don't think he was talking to me."

He smiled. "What did you do?"

I felt like crying. That doesn't happen often, to me. "I hurt his feelings." I told him. "I said some things I shouldn't. And then I got dragged here, so I lost him. He's a needle in a haystack."

Ernest nodded. "The world is a very big place when you're looking for someone."

"I miss him," I said. "And I don't know what I'm supposed to do next."

"Get on with the business of living," Ernest told me. "You don't have any other choice.”
― Jenny Valentine

“I was sad that nobody had come to my birthday party, but happy that I had a Batman figure, and there was a birthday present waiting to be read, a boxed set of the Narnia books, which I took upstairs. I lay on the bed and lost myself in the stories.

I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman's got to hold on to.”
― Stephen King, Dolores Claiborne