Couplets Quotes

“For freedom, I have learned, I'd barter virtue every time. For any fierce, untrammeled feeling, now I know I'd give up almost anything.”
― Maggie Millner, Couplets

“The proof of life is in the aching.”
― Maggie Millner, Couplets

“You can’t be lonely, after all, if you’re not inside yourself.”
― Maggie Millner, Couplets: A Love Story

“I had let my life become a story. Degradation was a theme, and rivalry, ecstasy, submission, happenstance. The only moral was the pressure f her hands, the grip of leather tugging at my wrist where the cuffs that were her birthday gift to me etched sallow, scar-like creases in the flesh..... Maybe that's why I felt most free when I was choked and tied with cables to the bed; when bound and gagged; when told that I was very, very bad.”
― Maggie Millner, Couplets

“but pained me in a way I couldn't fetishize”
― Maggie Millner, Couplets

“Still, every time you set out to objectify yourself completely, some small, inchoate voice would start to moan inside you, begging to be given subjectivity. The voice was as stubborn as a child, as terrified of abandonment.”
― Maggie Millner, Couplets

“The internet,
whose central purpose seemed to be
to turn the best parts of humanity—
our hungers for belonging, art, and sex—
into surveillance logs and payouts for execs”
― Maggie Millner, Couplets

“let me say that love has been, above all things, the engine of self-knowledge in my life—and even after everything is still what makes the rest worth suffering.”
― Maggie Millner, Couplets: A Love Story

“insisting that the body was a place where events occurred, rather than a thing to which they happened”
― Maggie Millner, Couplets: A Love Story

“You will fall in love. The relationship will end, though not at the same instant as the love. Some version of this will continue, maybe forever, happening to you.”
― Maggie Millner, Couplets: A Love Story

“dreams both include unappealing truths that usually elude the person living her daily life in prose.”
― Maggie Millner, Couplets: A Love Story

“You can’t be lonely, after all, if you’re not inside yourself. You can’t be dwelling if you’re somewhere else.”
― Maggie Millner, Couplets: A Love Story

“If there was a distinction to be drawn, it was only that the thought of my betrayal didn’t turn me on at all but pained me in a way I couldn’t fetishize.”
― Maggie Millner, Couplets: A Love Story

“It was hard to know which aspects to feel guilty for, so I was like my Catholic mother, always rounding up. Maybe that’s why I felt most free when I was choked and tied with cables to the bed; when bound and gagged; when told that I was very, very bad.”
― Maggie Millner, Couplets: A Love Story

“She’ll make you suffer in the end, he said— not meanly, but as if reporting something true about women in love and what they do.”
― Maggie Millner, Couplets: A Love Story

“It took months to really reach her through the cloud of myth my adoration made. Until I could, I lived in fear she’d finally see my fetish and discrepancy, and flee.”
― Maggie Millner, Couplets: A Love Story

“Last year, I met someone I thought I couldn’t live without, and in the process lost another, without whom I thought I’d die. If”
― Maggie Millner, Couplets: A Love Story

“I wouldn’t have to turn my eye inward, I thought, if I could train my eye on him—the one I loved. But I was wrong. My eye loved everything it fell upon.”
― Maggie Millner, Couplets: A Love Story

“feeling my tongue exult in flights by which experience might vault beyond the mind, become an externality.”
― Maggie Millner, Couplets

“Change is constant and inexorable. You will fall in love. The relationship will end, though not at the same instant as the love. Some version of this will continue, maybe forever, happening to you. Don’t promise your life to anybody.”
― Maggie Millner, Couplets

“And when I held her cheek against my cheek, I was drawing from the well of love he filled. So I became after all not him exactly but a kind of conduit between them: a conversation they conducted with my mouth. And when I was not unbelievably sad, I was moved to hold inside me both my lovers and to introduce them to each other there, in the hollow just above the heart, among the little folds where the voice starts.”
― Maggie Millner, Couplets