On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
by Ocean Vuong
“All freedom is relative—you know too well—and sometimes it’s no freedom at all, but simply the cage widening far away from you, the bars abstracted with distance but still there, as when they “free” wild animals into nature preserves only to contain them yet again by larger borders. But I took it anyway, that widening.“
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
by Raymond Carver
“All this, all of this love we’re talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory. Am I wrong? Am I way off base? Because I want you to set me straight if you think I’m wrong. I want to know. I mean, I don’t know anything, and I’m the first one to admit it.”
The Year of Magical Thinking
by Joan Didion
“As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs…The way I write is who I am, or have become…”
No one belongs here more than you.
by Miranda July
“I do this before I bring someone new into my life; I try to get a sense of who I am so that I can make it easier for them to know me.”
i want to die but i want to eat tteokbokki
by Baek Se-hee
“I am someone who is completely unique in this world, someone I need to take care of for the rest of my life, and therefore someone I need to help take each step forwards, warmly and patiently, to allow to rest on some days and to encourage on others – I believe that the more I look into this strange being, myself, the more routes I will find to happiness.”
Normal People
by Sally Rooney
“There’s always been something inside her that men have wanted to dominate, and their desire for domination can look so much like attraction, even love. In school the boys had tried to break her with cruelty and disregard, and in college men had tried to do it with sex and popularity, all with the same aim of subjugating some force in her personality. It depressed her to think people were so predictable. Whether she was respected or despised, it didn’t make much difference in the end. Would every stage of her life continue to reveal itself as the same thing, again and again, the same remorseless contest for dominance?”
September Love
by Lang Leav
“We reminisce so much about the past that it becomes like a second shadow. We dream so much about the future that we are hardly present.
We talk so much about our lives, we forget to live it.”
Just Kids
by Patty Smith
“There were days, rainy gray days, when the streets of Brooklyn were worthy of a photograph, every window the lens of a Leica, the view grainy and immoble. We gathered our colored pencils and sheets of paper and drew like wild, feral children into the night, until, exhausted, we fell into bed. We lay in each other’s arms, still awkward but happy, exchanging breathless kisses into sleep.”
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