Bria > Bria's Quotes

“It’s always a choice between fireworks and coffee in bed,’ Fabiana says. ‘It always is.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“There are men who never turn into boyfriends, who peer behind the curtain and see the mess of me—literal and figurative: the apartment with a narrow path through the clothes and trash leading from bed to bathroom; the drinking, endless drinking; the blackout sex and nightmares. “You’re kind of screwed up,” they say, at first with a laugh in their voice, an attitude of maybe this will be fun for a while, but as soon as I slur out the story—teacher, sex, fifteen, but I liked it, I miss it—they’re done. “You’ve got serious issues,” they say on their way out the door.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“I was an obvious target. He chose me not because I was special, but because he was hungry and I was easy. Back at my apartment, while the man and I have sex, I leave myself in a way I haven’t in years. He and my body are in the bedroom as my mind wanders the apartment, curls up on the couch, and stares at the blank TV.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“But the city doesn’t grab anyone under the arms: on the contrary, it constantly seeks to fend off the unfortunate people who repair to it in search of a career, to destroy them and annihilate them.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Woodcutters

“There aren’t that many ways to find comfort in this world. We must take it where we can get it, even in the darkest, most disgusting places. Nobody asks to be born. No one signs a form that says, You have my permission to make me exist. Babies are born, because parents feel that they themselves are not enough. So, parents, never condemn us for trying to fill our existential holes, when we are but the fruit of your own vain attempts to fill yours. It’s your fault we’re here to deal with the void in the first place.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“I have a vested interest in keeping things under control, because when I lose my illusions of control I get very scared. The world is scary enough as it is.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“Let’s pretend you are capable of being who I think I need you to be: a love story.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“But in the morning the beach was filled with tourists and the amethyst was just a rock. The quiet was gone again and replaced with nothingness. The candle had melted all over the deck and I spent a good half hour scraping wax, which was congealing—thinly—in the sun. I decided I would take Dominic for a walk over to the Santa Monica farmers’ market, try to be like other humans on a Sunday. Maybe buy some fruit and be swept away in some bullshit of the day. Maybe I could just be a woman and her dog buying fruit.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“Men could smell an opening and they could smell a closing.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“I lap your milk of illness up It nurtures my dying”
― Melissa Broder, Last Sext

“Being single is a distraction. I mean one of the things about marriage that is good for both men and women is that it frees you from all that energy that you use to put into dating. You can put it into work. You don’t have to worry about who is going to take you to the dinner party tomorrow. It takes time to be single, it seems to me.”
― Nora Ephron, Nora Ephron: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations

“I didn’t speak French well at all and did these terrible interviews in pigeon French.”
― Nora Ephron, Nora Ephron: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations

“If you don’t want something, it’s hard—in the movie business, especially.”
― Nora Ephron, Nora Ephron: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations

“I’d been sad in Dublin, decided it was Dublin’s fault, and thought Hong Kong would help.”
― Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times

“Completely. I’m glad other people do it, but for my part I’d rather hang on to the dim prospect of owning a house.”
― Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times

“flat. I wished Julian were married. It would make me a powerful person who could ruin his life. It would also provide an acceptable reason he did not want us to get too close. The more plausible reading was that he was single and that while I could on occasion discharge the rocket science of making him want to fuck me, he did not want to be my boyfriend. That hurt my ego. I wanted other people to care more about me than I did about them.”
― Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times

“Women in movies taught men how to feel things. They took men who felt nothing and made them feel something.”
― Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times

“When I met someone I liked, I wanted all of them, and fast.”
― Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times

“I felt disloyal to Edith when it made me smile, then to Julian because it was the kind of text Edith sent every day and I still appreciated it more from her than from him. This contravened all economics. Assuming my demand for nice messages was elastic, when they were scarcer it should surely drive up their value. But coming from Edith, they commanded a premium.”
― Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times

“Women took care of men and let them pretend we didn’t.”
― Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times

“The truth is, you like Julian because he enables this perception you have of yourself as a detached person. Plenty of people are willing to offer you intimacy. That terrifies you. You prefer feeling like no one will ever love you.”
― Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times

“Beginnings are always ripe with possibilities, for they hold the promise of completion. Through love we imagine a new way of being. You see me as I’ve never seen myself. You airbrush my imperfections, and I like what you see. With you, and through you, I will become that which I long to be. I will become whole. Being chosen by the one you chose is one of the glories of falling in love. It generates a feeling of intense personal importance. I matter. You confirm my significance.”
― Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic

“All paradises fail. —Constance Waverly”
― Sarah Dunn, The Arrangement

“All I had left was the precarious life of a writer.”
― Kate Zambreno, Drifts

“We are looking for new spaces, but what we are really looking for is retreat, clarity, to escape our internal chaos. For the days not to feel glued together.”
― Kate Zambreno, Drifts

“My mind spinning and stupid. “What prevents a book from being written becomes the book itself”—found in my notebook, citing the notebooks of Camus, who was himself quoting Marcus Aurelius.”
― Kate Zambreno, Drifts

“What prevents me from writing the book? The heat, the dog, the day, air-conditioning, desiring to exist in the present tense, constant thinking, sickness, fucking, groceries, cooking, yoga, loneliness and sadness, the internet, political depression, my period, obsession with skin care, late capitalism, binge-watching television on my computer, competition and jealousy over the attention of other writers, confusion over the novel, circling around but not finishing anything, reading, researching, masturbating, time passing.”
― Kate Zambreno, Drifts

“But that’s all I do lately too—I try to follow connections.”
― Kate Zambreno, Drifts

“The ones I love disappear, and I go chasing after them, and perhaps this is also why I am a writer.”
― Kate Zambreno, Drifts

“How precarious my life feels now. Will we move, will we stay here, will we have to welcome it, to see possibilities in it, not foreclose ourselves? Maybe we belong here, in this city. Or where else? How will I continue to exist, to write? I feel almost mesmerized by this sadness lately.”
― Kate Zambreno, Drifts