Radhika Singh

“He is sitting by the pool and talking to Harold and Julia when abruptly, he feels that strange hollowing in his stomach he occasionally experiences even when he and Jude are in the same house: the sensation of missing him, and odd desire to see him. And although he would never say it to him, this is the way Jude reminds him of Hemming—that awareness that sometimes touches him, as lightly as wings, that the people he loves are more temporal, somehow, than others, that he has borrowed them, and that someday they will be reclaimed from him.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“When he was in his thirties, he had looked at certain people’s relationships and asked the question that had (and continued to) fuel countless dinner-party conversations: What’s going on there? Now, though, as an almost-forty-eight-year-old, he saw people’s relationships as reflections of their keenest yet most inarticulable desires, their hopes and insecurities taking shape physically, in the form of another person. Now he looked at couples—in restaurants, on the street, at parties—and wondered: Why are you together? What did you identify as essential to you? What’s missing in you that you want someone else to provide?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“With my legs wobbling, I soldiered on. Shievering and sweating all over, I kept going. Fear didn’t warn me to stop; it only alerted me of an unusual event ahead. So, motivated by fear, I ran along; after all, I was created to do the unusual.”
― Abiodun Fijabi

“A wave of hurt broke over Francie and left her weak when it was passed. Another wave came, broke and receded. She found her way down to the cellar of her house and sat in the darkest corner on a heap of burlap sacks and waited while the hurt waves swept over her. As each wave spent itself and a new one gathered, she trembled. Tensely she sat there waiting for them to stop. If they didn't stop, she'd have to die--she'd have to die.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn