Liza MacShap

“The wound can have (should only have) just one proper name. I recognize that I love — you — by this: you leave in me a wound I do not want to replace.”
― Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond

“Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“I wanted to know people. I wanted to love. But I didn’t realize how badly I had been hurt. I didn’t realize that my habit of distance had become so unconscious and deep that I didn’t know how to be with another person. I could only fix that person in my imagination and turn him this way and that, trying to feel him, until my mind was tired and raw.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Veronica

“Beauty makes me hopeless. I don't care why anymore I just want to get away. When I look at the city of Paris I long to wrap my legs around it. When I watch you dancing there is a heartless immensity like a sailor in a dead-calm sea. Desires as round as peaches bloom in me all night, I no longer gather what falls.”
― Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry