emma

“And from those brief moments I was living with a certainty that I was exactly where I should be, where everything is deeply quiet and deeply alive. I thought about the many aspects in this life that I could not control or understand despite how much I wanted to or tried. How my father’s life, my mother’s life, the lives around me and the figures from the past they are not mine to determine, not mine to map out no matter how much they shaped what I had become however much we were connected. I could only help in small ways, I could listen and piece together and recount. But what was truly mine was only a little, no, a miniscule speck of it all. And while this is a sort of devastation to me, when I knew it would take some time to fully accept, it felt nice at least to be on the way in spite of not knowing exactly how far I had come nor how far I have left to go.”
― Alexandra Chang, Days of Distraction

“Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn't it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world's resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it's the very reason I root for us to survive - because we are so stupid about each other.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“If people appeared to behave pointlessly in grief, it was only because human life was pointless, and this was the truth that grief revealed.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“My love for him felt so total and so annihilating that it was often impossible for me to see him clearly at all.”
― Sally Rooney, Mr Salary