quotation – Page 10 – secretive dreams

But people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can’t live with what they’ve done.

Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master’s Son (via quoted-books)

Female violence is a specific brand of ferocity. It’s invasive. A girlfight is all teeth and hair, spit and nails — a much more fearsome thing to watch than two dudes clobbering each other. And the mental violence is positively gory. Women entwine. Some of the most disturbing, sick relationships I’ve witnessed are between long-time friends, and especially mothers and daughters. Innuendo, backspin, false encouragement, punishing withdrawal, sexual jealousy, garden-variety jealousy — watching women go to work on each other is a horrific bit of pageantry that can stretch on for years.

Gillian Flynn, I was not a nice little girl

There was, also, a strained nostalgia in those reunions, […] because she struggled to find, in these adult women, some remnants from her past that were often no longer there.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

But sometimes there’s nothing left to do but move on.

Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why

I may think of you softly from time to time. But I’ll cut off my hand before I ever reach for you again.

Arthur Miller, The Crucible
(via wordsnquotes)

There are places like this everywhere, places you enter as a young girl, from which you never return.

Louise Glück

There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.

Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (via quoted-books)

They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.

John Irving, The World According to Garp

It’s no good trying to keep up old friendships. It’s painful for both sides. The fact is, one grows out of people, and the only thing is to face it.

W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale or the Skeleton in the Cupboard

Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified.

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life