Garima

“Why was it that her generation had to demand transformation, sex, adventure, comfort, stability, romance, conversation, intimacy, all from the one person? What’s so bad about settling?”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“To remember that God is not the nice man Jesus, who liked everybody and went around healing the sick; that God is, on the contrary, the one who makes people sick, who condemns people to death, for incomprehensible reasons. Jesus the healer, the listener, teacher, friend of sinners, seems in Margaret’s mind to be practically on the brink of murmuring: Sorry about my dad… Jesus is easy to love and God much harder.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“Stories told on a battlefield, on a life raft, in a hospital ward at night. In a café that will disappear before morning. Someone overhears. Someone listens, attentive with all his heart. No one listens. The story told to one who is slipping into sleep, or into unconsciousness, never to wake. The story told to one who survives who will tell that story to a child, who will write it down in a book, to be read by a woman in a country or a time not her own. The story told to oneself. The fervent confession. The meandering, repetitive search for meaning in a gesture, in a moment that has eluded the speaker’s understanding for a lifetime. Stories incomprehensible to the listener yet received nonetheless – by darkness, by the wind, by a place, by an unperceiving or unperceived pity, even by indifference. What we give cannot be taken from us.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“Sometimes you need people to be perfect and they can’t be and you hate them forever for not being even though it isn’t their fault and it’s not yours either. You just needed something they didn’t have in them to give you.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo