sanjana ★

“Alice found it a bit difficult to breathe just then. Her cheeks burned, and her head felt uncomfortably light. She’d hoped, as an undergraduate, that this intense physiological reaction to jealousy might eventually go away, but as she progressed through graduate school it only grew worse. Every published paper, every conference invitation, elicited a panicked, fight-or-flight response, one that she’d never gotten good at concealing.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“Misty's personality was a deliberate creation. She felt she was not unlike one of those seashells that look elaborate, but is only the housing for a very soft animal. There was no point—and no fun—in committing the imitative fallacy in matters of self, especially when the self you were housing was moved by scenes of ordinary human kindness. It seemed to her unwise to let the world at large know how easily moved she was, so she kept it to herself. Even John Bride, who behaved like a creature from another planet who had come to earth to see how its creatures might amuse him, was unaware of how deep her feelings were.”
― Laurie Colwin, Happy All the Time

“She gazed at Peter and thought, 'I wish I were the night, so that I might watch your sleep with a thousand eyes.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“That simply means not being fraught,' said Holly. 'Not being caught up in the unnecessary tensions of modern life.”
― Laurie Colwin, Happy All the Time