Catherine

“After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble. ”
― Richard Russo, Empire Falls

“Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself. ”
― Lorrie Moore, Birds of America: Stories

“It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“I wanted to kill the me underneath. That fact haunted my days and nights. When you realize you hate yourself so much, when you realize that you cannot stand who you are, and this deep spite has been the motivation behind your behavior for many years, your brain can’t quite deal with it. It will try very hard to avoid that realization; it will try, in a last-ditch effort to keep your remaining parts alive, to remake the rest of you. This is, I believe, different from the suicidal wish of those who are in so much pain that death feels like relief, different from the suicide I would later attempt, trying to escape that pain. This is a wish to murder yourself; the connotation of kill is too mild. This is a belief that you deserve slow torture, violent death.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia