Calista

“I took a step toward her. "It is my right to reside in my own mind. It is my right," I said. "It is my right to be unsociable and it is my right to be unpleasant to be around. Do you ever listen to yourself? This is crazy, that is crazy, everything is crazy to you. By whose measure? Well, it is my right to be crazy, as you love to say so much. I have no shame. I have felt many things in my life, but shame is not among them." The volume of my voice caused me to stand on my tiptoes. I could not remember yelling like this, ever. "You may think that I have an obligation to you but I assure you that us being thrown together in this arbitrary arrangement does not cohesion make. I have never had less of an obligation to anyone in my life, you aggressively ordinary woman.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“It is necessary to fall in love – the better to provide an alibi for all the despair we are going to feel anyway.”
― Albert Camus

“There are times when I am convinced I am unfit for any human relationship.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

“We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ideas with which we've learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album