Jenna Wang

“...until I had been forced to bite my tongue to keep from saying what I really thought: that despite the craftsmanship it made absolutely zero difference whether Kitsey chose the x pattern or the y pattern since as far as I was concerned it was basically all the same; new, charmless, dead-in-hand, not to mention the expense: eight hundred dollars for a made-yesterday plate? One plate? There were beautiful eighteenth-century sets to be had for a fraction of the price of this cold, bright, newly-minted stuff.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“All of this is meaningless.
I can't take it anymore.
I can't go on any longer.
I don't want to.
She took one more look around at the various objects inside the house. They did not belong to her. Just like her life had never belonged to her.
Her life was no more than a ghostly pageant of exhausted endurance, no more real than a television drama. Death, who now stood by her side, was as familiar to her as a family member, missing for a long time but now returned.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“Often in my life, in the throes of despair, of my husband's abuse, I have held the certainty of the damned, that sense of "everything is going to be just this, this misery forever, till I die." An irrepressible inescapable horror stretching out infinitely in every direction. Tragic, that only terror feels that way.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“I've drawn my whole life--when I was in school, when I was bored, when I was nursing Cyrus--but at the diner, where everything was automatic, autonomic, where I was selling my body's labor but not my mind's, I found my sketches became so much more interesting, free. Unencumbered by higher brain, which clocked out when I clocked in, my whole person was functionally unconscious, bussing form table to table and then stealing away a minute or three drawing at my notepad in the dishroom.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!