Lara Lesnihina

“Soon people will lose touch with the very idea of free time. We’ll never be bored again — there will always be something to do, something to buy, something new to learn, a conversation to jump into. But back then, nothing felt better than a planless Friday night alone with my zine. The endlessness of a free night, writing just to see myself on the page, even if no one would ever read it. A string of one-sided crusades, all those manifestos passed around between two or three kindred spirits. Only in my zine could I admit that I dreamed of something greater. In real life, I was afraid to step into a world too big and fail. But on paper, I wrote honestly and openly — in a way I never had the courage to say out loud.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“She didn’t know how to point out the insincerity to her daughter, who was part of a generation of educated women that paid rapt attention to the things that gave them pleasure and turned them into rituals for display.”

White on White”
― Aysegül Savas

“Afterward I go to the café with some of the other parents. I listen to them all talking about the apartments they're buying. They don't seem happy. The guys are all bored and the women are worried about getting old. They all go to the same places on vacation. They end up in Megève, Biarritz, or Greece every summer. Maybe I'd be doing the same if I had money. Sometimes I feel like telling them they're all getting worked up over nothing. They'd be better off thinking about something else. They could easily survive without buying an apartment, without worrying about what tiles to put in their bathrooms, without leaving Paris for the summer. Vacations are such a pain in the ass. When I moved, I threw pretty much everything out. I kept two pairs of jeans, my jacket, a bed for my son, a sofa for me, and that's it. I left the cutlery, the crockery, the washing machine, and the furniture in my old apartment, the rest of my clothes and all the other crap went in the dumpster. I felt better right away. I go and buy a sandwich when I'm hungry. I like the Oliva from Cosi. Or the meal deal from the Japanese place that includes four skewers, cabbage salad, and a drink. They usually deliver within fifteen minutes.”
― Constance Debré, Play Boy

“The cruelest thing about reading is when you find the perfect book — the one that mirrors your life exactly. It resonates completely with your inner world, with your emotional currents — this book speaks to you. All of us, as readers, long to find that book. But we rarely stop to consider what it would truly mean if we did. It would be an annihilation, a miniature destruction of you as both a reader and a writer. Because that book — that perfect book — could have been written by you. But it wasn’t.”
― Sarah Chihaya, Bibliophobia