Cheng

“Of course if we all stay alone and practice celibacy and carefully police our personal boundaries, many problems will be avoided, but it seems we will also have almost nothing left that makes life worthwhile.”
― Salley Rooney

“I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal—the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always—just to live and be with other people?”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“Sarat envied the malleability of boys' bodies, the way they could, while still boys, cast their physical shapes forward into adulthood like reconnaissance scouts. All her life she'd had little interest in the working of boys' minds, which she imagined only as a set of flimsy pinwheels turning in the direction of obvious things. But she longed to have such a malleable, predictable body--one that could grow big and strong and yet not raise a single stranger's eyebrow.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War