I've been looked at in pity and in fear and I've learned that the only way to really be seen is through desire. To be looked at and found whole. Found alive. Please look at me. I promise you that I am here.

Cursed Bread, Sophie Mackintosh

I think about the tracking of poisons or dyes in the body, Violet, how the colour blooms through the veins, how the pathways all light up. I try to understand what I was to you but it's all tangled up. How trite it was, in the end, you playing at transcendence like it would save you from the little domesticities of your lot, the things you felt beneath you, the things that were only for women like me. Water and soap and flour, sweat-marked linen and butter and lye and buttons and thread - how could they possibly compete with the life you had imagined for yourself, up there in the mountains?

Cursed Bread, Sophie Mackintosh

I can't stop chewing it over. What have I done? you asked me sometimes, never what has been done to me?

Cursed Bread, Sophie Mackintosh

There's a paragraph in "Walking" that lends itself easily to the metaphor we make of walking: "What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will walk? I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not indifferent to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we are very liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult to choose our direction, because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea." In walking, as in living, you must choose a path. You must go one way, and so give up another way.

Six Walks, Ben Shattuck

Something was sown here, and then, because I left so soon, it never blossomed but couldn't die. Everything I've done in life suddenly pales and threatens to come undone. I have not lived my life. I've lived another.

Homo Irrealis, Andre Aciman

Sadie liked the phrase "an abundance of caution." It reminded her of a murder of crows, a flock of seagulls, a pack of wolves. She imagined that ‘caution’ was a creature of some kind- maybe, a cross between a Saint Bernard and an elephant. A large, intelligent, friendly animal that could be counted on to defend the Green sisters from threats, existential and otherwise.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin

This is what time travel is. It's looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently. And that mode of transport only worked with those one had known a significant time

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin

What a pity to be the last to arrive, not to speak the language they spoke, not to have true intimacy.

The Lying Life of Adults, Elena Ferrante

The warmth, the subdued lighting, the murmuring voices and laughter, the grossly patterned carpet beneath her sensible shoes, the sound of music faintly from the ceiling, all merged into a palatable shepherd's pie of an atmosphere in which she felt at home.

Sheep’s Clothing, Celia Dale

Then I felt like an adult, forced to live in the body of a child. Since, I feel like a child, privileged to live in the body of an adult. The zealot of seriousness in me, because it was already full-grown in the child, continues to think of reality as yet-to-be. Still sees a big space ahead, a far horizon. Is this the real world? I still ask myself that, forty years later ... as small children ask re-peatedly, in the course of a long, tiring journey, "Are we there yet?"

Pilgrimage, Susan Sontag

Ancient Greek has a singular and a plural, as in other languages. But there is also the dual, which is used for two things that naturally occur together: twins, a pair of turtle doves, breasts, the two halves of a walnut in one shell. Do you see? Eleanora asked Isadora, looking up from the Greek grammar that lay open between them. Only for two things that embrace each other. As when you sleep in my arms, my sweet.

After Sappho, Selby Wynn Schwartz

In Ancient Greek, to utter a wish or a hope, there is the optative. The optative is a mood, almost a feeling. It hovers in the air just outside of time or subject, wistful in colour, its edges slightly tinged with foreboding. If only, if only would that it were so, the optative pleads. Let it be so, let it somehow come to pass! We were well aquatinted with the optative mood, in those days we used it often with each other. We wavered between invoking our desires aloud and shyly hoping they would simply happen to us, like weather

After Sappho, Selby Wynn Schwartz

“In the garden it seemed that time hung in the air like incense, a burnt cloud. It obscured our intentions and the contours of our faces. We could hardly see to kiss each other goodnight”

After Sappho, Selby Wynn Schwartz