Ásta Ólafs

“A sister is not a friend. Who can explain the urge to take a relationship as primal and complex as a sibling and reduce it to something as replaceable, as banal as a friend? Yet this status is used again and again to connote the highest intimacy. True sisterhood is not the same as friendship. You don't choose each other and there is no furtive period of getting to know each other. You are a part of each other, right from the start. Look at an umbilical cord—tough, sinuous, unlovely, yet essential—and compare it to a friendship bracelet of brightly woven thread. That is the difference between a sister and a friend.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“I know we’re supposed to spin terrible things to make it sound like they were actually good, but that’s bullshit. That heart attack did not save your life. Cancer is not a gift. Your abuser did not give you strength. Terrible things are terrible. Let’s just acknowledge it. If you found strength, wisdom, or a new way of thinking, that’s awesome, but notice that the strength, wisdom, and new worldview came out of you, which means it was all there inside you to begin with.”
― Paris Hilton, Paris

“He'd never been to see a shrink.
'Why?' She asked.
'Either because I never quarreled with who I was or because I was afraid what I'd uncover and end up quarreling with everything I was.”
― André Aciman, Room on the Sea

“For a conversation to unroll between two persons you need a base of sympathy. People with completely different ideas and incompatible interests, if they share a degree of sympathy and warmth between them, can talk for hours. People with identical interests, without sympathy, live in silence.”
― André Aciman, Room on the Sea