Kristen

“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

“...her father finds being called a Holocaust surviver demeaning. 'When people talk about the Holocaust, they talk about gas chambers, Auschwitz -- the Holocaust is not just about that,' she said. 'It's about the little humiliations, the loss of dignity.'

Her father made much the same point in the film. 'People talk about Sophie's Choice as if it was a rare event,' he said. 'It wasn't. Everybody had to make Sophie's Choice -- all of us. My mother left behind a four-year-old with the maid. You don't think I was beaten and shot at? There are no violins in my story. It is the most common thing that happened.”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Best American Science Writing 2011

“It’s easy to be close, but almost impossible to stay close. Think about friends. Think about hobbies. Even ideas. They’re close to us—sometimes so close we think they are part of us—and then, at some point, they aren’t close anymore. They go away. Only one thing can keep something close over time: holding it there. Grappling with it. Wrestling it to the ground, as Jacob did with the angel, and refusing to let go. What we don’t wrestle we let go of. Love isn’t the absence of struggle. Love is struggle.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Here I Am

“All happy mornings resemble one another, as do all unhappy mornings, and that’s at the bottom of what makes them so deeply unhappy: the feeling that this unhappiness has happened before, that efforts to avoid it will at best reinforce it, and probably even exacerbate it, that the universe is, for whatever inconceivable, unnecessary, and unjust reason, conspiring against the innocent sequence of clothes, breakfast, teeth and egregious cowlicks, backpacks, shoes, jackets, goodbye. Jacob”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Here I Am