Jasmine Dove

“If he silently decides not to say something when they’re talking, Marianne will ask ‘what?’ within one or two seconds. This ‘what?’ question seems to him to contain so much: not just the forensic attentiveness to his silences that allows her to ask in the first place, but a desire for total communication, a sense that anything unsaid is an unwelcome interruption between them.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“How quickly contempt can dissipate when faced with the pathetic humanness of another person. You see inside them for even the briefest moment and suddenly empathy blows through. A dark sky cleared by a hard rain.”
― Stephen Markley, Ohio

“It suggests to Connell that the same imagination he used as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“They'd both learned that a memory is a fact that has been dyed and trimmed and rinsed so many times that it comes out looking almost unrecognizable to anyone else who was in that room or anyone who was standing on the grass beneath that telephone pole.”
― Mary Beth Keane, Ask Again, Yes