Daria

“Not for the first time Marianne thinks cruelty does not only hurt the victim, but the perpetrator also, and maybe more deeply and more permanently. You learn nothing very profound about yourself simply by being bullied; but by bullying someone else you learn something you can never forget.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“She closes her eyes. He probably won’t come back, she thinks. Or he will, differently. What they have now they can never have back again. But for her the pain of loneliness will be nothing to the pain that she used to feel, of being unworthy. He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her. Meanwhile his life opens out before him in all directions at once. They’ve done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another.
You should go, she says. I’ll always be here. You know that.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Though I don't know this today, I am making a choice. I am choosing not to choose. My mind has gone numb precisely so that I won't understand that somewhere buried deep in this mess there's a right and a wrong. Someone is the villain here. I just have no idea who it is, and I don't want to know - because knowing will mean I will have to choose my mother over my sister, or my sister over my mother. I've already lost so much I can't bring myself to lose any more. For the rest of my life, I will become stupid around this subject. I will shrug my shoulders when people ask me why my sister and mother don't speak. "My sister contested my father's will", I will say, as if this is the end of the story - or the beginning.”
― Dani Shapiro, Slow Motion: A True Story

“The fact that I had never wanted to be a doctor was nothing more than a footnote to a story that interested no one. You wouldn’t think a person could succeed in something as difficult as medicine without wanting to do it, but it turned out I was part of a long and noble tradition of self-subjugation.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House