kanzad

“Ben laughed. He was intent on finding the underbelly of positivity lurking beneath everything I said. “How do you not have a boyfriend?” “Boys can’t handle me,” I said flippantly. He smiled in response, and part of me felt tender, too much so, my insides exposed to the air. I had the perverse desire to test the limits of his optimism.”
― Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties: Stories

“Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn't it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world's resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it's the very reason I root for us to survive - because we are so stupid about each other.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“A woman has a way of screaming with her whole body that only other women can hear.”
― Salma El-Wardany, These Impossible Things

“The way your mother rolls her eyes at you, your sudden decision to stop eating red meat, the immediate unexplainable sadness you felt when you saw your father’s shirt draped over the back of a chair. You can write it all down, you can put it in your book of facts, but the truth is no one can ever really understand the tangle of experiences and passions that makes you who you are. It’s a secret collection, a private language, a pebble in your pocket that you play with when you’re anxious, hard as geometry, smooth as soap.”
― Raphael Bob-Waksberg, Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory