ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ alice oseman

• loveless: in the end, that was the problem with romance. it was so easy to romanticise romance because it was everywhere. [...] I could see it all, all the time, all around, but when I got closer, I found nothing was there.

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ autumn sonata

• a mother and a daughter, what a terrible combination of feelings and confusion and destruction, everything is possible and is done in the name of love and solicitude. the mother's injuries are handed down to the daughter, the mother's failures are paid for by the daughter, the mother's unhappiness will be the daughter's unhappiness, it's as if the umbilical cord had never been cut. is it so? is the daughter's misfortune the mother's triumph? is my grief your secret pleasure?
• sometimes, when I lie awake at night I wonder whether I've lived at all. is it the same for everybody? or do some people have a greater talent for living than others. or do some people never live, but just exist? then I'm seized by fear. I'm seized by fear and see a horrible picture of myself. I have never grown up, my face and my body have aged, I acquire memories and experiences, but inside all that I haven't even been born. I can't remember any faces, not even my own.

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ bridgerton

• harmony: it is because I have never met anyone like you. it is maddening, how much you consume my very being. [...] all I find myself thinking about, all I find myself being able to breathe for is you. do you think that I want to be in this position? contending with these thoughts of wanting to be nowhere except with you. wanting to run away with you. of acting on the most impure, forbidden desires, no matter how much I must remind myself I am a gentleman, and you are a lady. of that scent. it has remained imprinted on my mind ever since the night of the conservatory ball on that terrace. lilies.
• the viscount who loved me: I love you. I've loved you from the moment we raced each other in that park. I've loved you at every dance, on every walk, every time we've been together, and every time we've been apart. you do not have to accept it or embrace it or even allow it. knowing you, you probably will not. but you must know it, in your heart. you must feel it because I do. I love you. [...] I want a life that suits us both. I know I am imperfect, but I will humble myself before you because I cannot imagine my life without you, and that is why I wish to marry you.
• an offer from a gentleman: I stay away because you consume me. my eyes search for you in every room I enter. my heart beats when you are near. the reality of you has become more tantalizing than any fantasy ever could be, and one I cannot live without.
• yes or no: I cannot think of a maid every waking hour, longing for a life with her, and yet you have taken possession of me, shot me back to life, turned me from someone who could not sit still for a moment to one who wishes to be in one single place beside you for as long as I might live. [...] you are not that kite in my study. you're the person I have been searching for all my life.

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ charlotte brontë

• I am no bird, and no net ensnares me, I am a free human being, with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ elena ferrante

• the days of abandonment: I was not the woman who breaks into pieces under the blows of abandonment and absence, who goes mad, who dies. only a few fragments had splintered off, for the rest I was well. I was whole, whole I would remain. to those who hurt me, I react giving back in kind. I am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through fire and is not burned.
• the days of abandonment: the whole future, I thought, will be that way, life lives together with the damp odor of the land of the dead, attention with inattention, passionate leaps of the heart along with abrupt losses of meaning. but it won't be worse that the past.

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ emily dickinson

• I'm nobody! who are you? I'm nobody! who are you? are you nobody too? then there's a pair of us! don't tell! they'd advertise, you know! how dreary to be somebody! how public, like a frog, to tell one's name, the livelong june, to an admiring bog!

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ fleabag

• I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life, father, because so far I think I've been getting it wrong.

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ jane austen

• emma: "I cannot make speeches, emma," he soon resumed; and in a tone of such sincere, decided, intelligible tenderness as was tolerably convincing. "If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more."
• persuasion: I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. you pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago.

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ joyn mulaney: baby J

• all I cared about was what other people thought of me. and I don't anymore. and I don't because I can honestly say what is someone going to do to me, that's worse than what I would do to myself.

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ marguerite duras

• the lover: I've never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door.
• the lover: I feel a sadness I expected and which comes only from myself. I say I've always been sad. that I can see the same sadness in photos of myself when I was small. that today, recognizing it as the sadness I've always had, I could almost call it by my own name, it's so like me.

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ sally rooney

• normal people: marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn't know if she would ever find out where it was or become part of it.

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ scenes from a marriage

• I know just what you're thinking. "a spoiled woman with no sense of humor. she has everything she could possibly want, but still she goes on about love. what about friendship, loyalty, security?" let me tell you something. I have a mental picture of myself that doesn't correspond to reality.
• I tell myself I have the capacity to love. but it's been... bottled up. the life I've led has stifled my potential.

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ summer strike

• actually, I broke down trying to live up to other people's standards. I was troubled because I thought everyone was running ahead, while I was the only one falling behind. so for now, I'm trying to become friends with myself rather than others.

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ suzanne rivecca

• ugly, bitter, and true: the san francisco therapist kept telling me I shouldn't be terrified of creative experimentation. "I don't know what's going to come out of me," I told her. "it has to be perfect. it has to be irreproachable in every way." "why?" she said. "to make up for it," I said. "to make up for the fact that it's me."

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ sylvia plath

• the unabridged journals of sylvia plath: I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love. I am still so naive; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don't ask me who I am. a passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ the children's hour

• listen to me, I have loved you the way they said. there's always been something wrong, always, as long as I can remember, but I never knew it until all this happened. you're afraid of hearing it, I'm more afraid than you. you've got to know it, I can't keep it to myself any longer, I've got to tell you that I'm guilty. I've been telling myself that since the night we heard the child say it, I lie in bed night after night praying that it isn't true, but I know about it now. it's there, I don't know how, I don't know why, but I did love you, I do love you. I resented your plans to marry, maybe because I wanted you, maybe I wanted you all these years. I couldn’t call it by a name, but maybe it's been there ever since I first knew you, I never felt that way about anybody but you, I've never loved a man, I never knew why before, maybe it's that. it's funny, it's all mixed up. there's something in you and you don't do anything about it because you don't know it's there, suddenly a little girl gets bored and tells a lie, and there, that night, you see it for the first time, and you say it to yourself, did she see it, did she sense it? she found the lie with the ounce of truth.

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ the great dictator

• to those who can hear me, I say do not despair. the misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. the hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. and so long as men die, liberty will never perish. soldiers! don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. don't give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! you are not machines! you are not cattle! you are men! you have the love of humanity in your hearts! you don't hate! only the unloved hate, the unloved and the unnatural! soldiers! don't fight for slavery! fight for liberty!