Chiara

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Chiara is Currently Reading

Chiara is currently reading

Kingfisher

by Rozie Kelly

bookshelves: currently-reading

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Aug 05, 2026 11:32PM

“Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.”
― Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

tags: family-relationships, feuds, hate, love, mother, mothers-and-daughters

160 likes

“I know,' said Erin, and described how she'd lately felt depressed in a new and scary way, which Paul also had felt lately and described as a sadness-based fear, immune to tone and interpretation, as if not meant for humans - more visceral than sadness, but unlike fear because it decreased heart rate and impaired the senses, causing everything to seem 'darker.”
― Tao Lin, Taipei

2 likes

“After our call, I realized the thing I always do: I try to imagine different futures for myself, what I would most like to occur. I don't know why I do this, when any of the things I've hoped for—whenever I have actually got them—are nothing like what I imagined they'd be. Then why don't I spend time acclimating myself to what actually occurred? Why not make peace with the way things are, given what I know about life from living? Instead I spin fantasies, when the only happiness I have ever known has occurred without my design.”
― Sheila Heti, Motherhood

3 likes

“I learned a lot from that, like how much it hurt to see how other people described you, and how things that you said about another person, especially your parents, seemed neutral when addressed to a third party, but lethal when you thought about your parents reading it.”
― Elif Batuman, Either/Or

11 likes

“Laura ordered a margarita, then sometimes turned her head 90 degrees, to her right, to stare outside—at the sidewalk, or the quiet street—with a self-consciously worried expression, seeming disoriented and shy in a distinct, uncommon manner indicating to Paul an underlying sensation of “total yet failing” (as opposed to most people’s “partial and successful”) effort, in terms of the social interaction but, it would often affectingly seem, also generally, in terms of existing. Paul had gradually recognized this demeanor, the past few years, as characteristic, to some degree, of every person, maybe since middle school, with whom he’d been able to form a friendship or enter a relationship (or, it sometimes seemed, earnestly interact and not feel alienated or insane). After”
― Tao Lin, Taipei

2 likes

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