Issy

“Maybe friendship is being the guardian of another person's hope. Leave it with me and I'll look after it for a while , if it feels too heavy for now.”
― Dolly Alderton, Ghosts

“And we hate people for making mistakes so much more than we love them for doing good that the easiest way to live is to do nothing, say nothing, and love no one.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“People can be monsters, or vulnerable as lambs. They—no, we—are perpetrators and victims at the same time. It takes so little to tip the scale one way or the other. This is the world we live in,”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

“Later, you will you learn that a common feature of domestic abuse is “dislocation.” That is to say, the victim has just moved somewhere new, or she’s somewhere where she doesn’t speak the language, or has been otherwise uprooted from her support network, her friends or family, her ability to communicate. She is made vulnerable by her circumstance, her isolation. Her only ally is her abuser, which is to say she has no ally at all. And so she has to struggle against an unchangeable landscape that has been hammered into existence by nothing less than time itself; a house that is too big to dismantle by hand; a situation too complex and overwhelming to master on her own.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House