Julia

“To love, and for his love to be accepted, yes. It was in fact painful, the relief of all that compression suddenly, to say the words aloud, and hear her saying them, to be loved by her, it was so needed that it actually hurt. Not even a feeling of unmixed happiness, but of happiness that was strongly and confusingly mixed with many other feelings. Sadness, missing his father, and a kind of shame somehow because each passing day seemed to bring Ivan further away from him and the life they used to have together. A life that was receding increasingly into the past--into the realm of childhood and adolescence. The realization that his adulthood, into which he was entering now so definitively, and which would last all the rest of his life, would have to be lived without his father. That he was becoming a person his father would never know.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“How do we move through all this beauty without destroying it?”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“They look at one another a moment longer. Both of them believing themselves so clever, so capable. Always a step ahead, a move ahead, of each other, of everyone else. What a mess they have made, he thinks, yes, both of them. An impossible situation. Which they have both colluded to draw out and prolong over how many years. With what aim, with what end in mind, neither he supposes ever knew. Their love for one another, yes: which has survived its own death.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“I forgive you, of course. Everything. I love you very much, and I forgive you, completely. The touch of her hand at his face, the same and not the same: both the same and not. To reunite him with himself he thinks she means to. To feel himself continuous with his own past, to accept for the rest of his life the permanent encircling shadow of everything he has lost. To stagger on, ashamed, vanquished, demanding nothing, forsaking all his pride and self-conceit. Grateful that his losses have as yet gone only so far and no further. That God in his unknowable wisdom and mercy has left him this much.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo