nicole

“Empedolces claims that in utero, our backbone is one long solid; and that through the constriction of the womb and the punishments of birth it must be snapped again and again to form our vertebrae; that for the child to have a spine, his back must first be broken”
― M.T. Anderson, The Pox Party

“All this time, I'd wanted to do a job so well that I'd feel done. I wanted to accomplish enough to be good enough. But if that wasn't possible, then the very condition I'd been working so hard to avoid - being uncertain and unfinished - might be unavoidable. It might just be how life was, and everyone else had known it all along, like they all knew what a lobsterman was, and I'd been working my ass off like a mouse on a wheel, not realizing that I was running toward cheese that wasn't even there.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays

“The line between what was real and what was fantasy. That fucking mystery. It made me believe there was something to be solved and I was the only one who could solve it. I let myself think that I was the protagonist in some grand adventure, that I could be in any way special. And for that I forfeited what I did have that was real: I forfeited Veracity.”
― Jane Pek, The Verifiers

“Somewhere deep in my twisted little brain is the desire to be so good at so many things that I earn the chance to be multiple people. It seems so unfair that we only get to read the choose-your-own adventure book of our lives once, that we can't pick a point and go, "Okay, this time flip to page 102 and do the rest another way.”
― Mary Laura Philpott, I Miss You When I Blink: Essays