Karena

“She does not cry for me,” he says, his voice hardening. “She cries for her lost youth, her missed opportunities and her limited options. She does not cry for me, she cries for herself.”
― Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, the Serial Killer

“Pity, I would have called it, but it wasn’t pity. It was something far scarier and more destabilizing, something I would never let myself name so long as I needed to feel superior to their pain.”
― Alex McElroy, The Atmospherians

“My neighbors’ distress didn’t surprise me. This was New Jersey, after all, home to the insecure and impressionable. Jersey was a land of lacking, the slow-footed little sibling to Manhattan: always never enough. My neighbors were tame, small-hearted gentrifiers who cared deeply about property value.”
― Alex McElroy, The Atmospherians

“I fucked them because I liked predictable men, the guarded and repressed. Sensitive men wouldn’t be trusted; they assumed their sensitivity made them special, deserving of praise. Most sensitive men were, at their cores, narcissists who constructed elaborate expectations for how relationships were meant to evolve. When those expectations weren’t met, the facade of sensitivity deteriorated into a petulant rage.”
― Alex McElroy, The Atmospherians