Dee

“The woman wanderer goes forth to seek the Land of Freedom.

“How am I to get there?” Reason answers: “here is one way, and one only. Down the banks of Labour, through the water of suffering. There is no other.”

The woman cries out: “For what do I go to this far land which no one has ever reached? Oh, I am alone! I am utterly alone!”

But soon she hears the sounds of feet, ‘a thousand times ten thousand and thousands of thousands, and they beat this way!’

“They are the feet of those who shall follow you. Lead on.”
― Olive Schreiner

“That framing is everything. That if you can frame the terrible things in the best possible way, that’s where true happiness comes from.”
― Abby Jimenez, Just for the Summer

“/A weekend toward the end of September, the bell above the door rang and there he was in the shop. Same old feeling in my guts.
I’ll go if you want me to, he said.
I smiled, I was so fucking happy to see him.
You’ve only just got here, you twat, I said. Now give us a hand with this, and he took the other end of the trestle table and moved it over to the wall. Pub? I said.
He grinned. And before I could say anything else he put his arms around me. And everything he couldn’t say in our room in France was said in that moment. I know, I said. I know. I’d already accepted I wasn’t the key to unlock him.
She’d come later.
It took a while to acknowledge the repercussions of that time. How the numbness in my fingertips traveled to my heart and I never even knew it.
I had crushes, I had lovers, I had orgasms. My trilogy of desire, I liked to call it, but I’d no great love after him, not really. Love and sex became separated by a wide river and one the ferryman refused to cross. The psychiatrist liked that analogy. I watched him write it down. Chuckle, chuckle, his pen across the page.”
― Sarah Winman, Tin Man

“There's something about first love, isn't there? she said. It's untouchable to those who played no part in it. But it's the measure of all that follows.”
― Sarah Winman, Tin Man