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“When I try to picture for myself what a happy life might look like, the picture hasn't changed very much since I was a child - a house with flowers and trees around it, and a river nearby, and a room full of books, and someone there to love me, that's all. Just to make a home there, and to care for my parents when they grow older. Never to move, never to board a plane again, just to live quietly and then be buried in the earth.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“And isn’t death just the apocalypse in the first person?”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“If queerness is too much, then straightness is too little, the relational manifestation of lack. Let us not forget that “straight” was originally something of an insult, a slang term first used by gay men in the mid-twentieth century to describe men who had once been sexually fluid but had returned, at least temporarily, to the confines of a straight and narrow life.7 The use of “straight” as an insult continued into the 1960s and ’70s among hippies, self-identified freaks, and counterculture enthusiasts who used the term to describe the stifling and uninspired quality of mainstream American life.”
― Jane Ward, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

“I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.” In”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility