Mariana

“If there was a party, everyone in turn would come sit next to me to regale me with how he or sh thought I should live and what I deserved to have. What it boiled down to was that I should live like them. Elvire, one half of a tightly knit couple would forget that her husband was clinically depressed. Guillaume, married to a harpy, maintained that if one laid low and said amen to everything, things worked out. Maria, fed up to the teeth with her children, wanted me to have my own. Assia loved women but it was killing her mother. Patrizio had bruises on his shoulders from his chronically jealous wife. Not one of them could stand my singleness, because it could have been theirs.”
― Sophie Fontanel, The Art of Sleeping Alone: Why One French Woman Suddenly Gave Up Sex

“She is a good woman, he thought. The type of woman whose goodness is oppressive.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian, The Vegetarian

“If you would have your son to walk honorably through the world, you must not attempt to clear the stones from his path, but teach him to walk firmly over them - not insist upon leading him by the hand, but let him learn to go alone.”
― Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

“Those who are made can be unmade.”
― Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies