Julia

“Normal people say, I can’t imagine feeling so bad I’d genuinely want to die. I do not try and explain that it isn’t that you want to die. It is that you know you are not supposed to be alive, feeling a tiredness that powders your bones, a tiredness with so much fear. The unnatural fact of living is something you must eventually fix.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“Martha,” he said afterwards, lying next to me. “Everything is broken and messed up and completely fine. That is what life is. It’s only the ratios that change. Usually on their own. As soon as you think that’s it, it’s going to be like this forever, they change again.” That is what life was, and how it continued for three years after that. The ratios changing on their own, broken, completely fine, a holiday, a leaking pipe, new sheets, happy birthday, a technician between nine and three, a bird flew into the window, I want to die, please, I can’t breathe, I think it’s a lunch thing, I love you, I can’t do this anymore, both of us thinking it would be like that forever.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“But inside the self performing as someone who was fine was the self who was not, and the vision I'd had of my life, the one that had me wanting to scream, was a vision of how living this way, inside of this performance, had blighted my life. I felt like a tree struck by lightning a long time ago, burning secretly from the inside out, the bark still smooth to the end -- the word FINE painted on it.”
― Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“I say almost nothing, almost all the time. Obviously, I recognize, in a grander sense, that I have a tendency to alienate myself and blow things out of proportion, and that these women are basically guiltless from a certain perspective.”
― Halle Butler, The New Me