Macy Shackelford

“For to wish to forget how much you loved someone—and then, to actually forget—can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart. I have heard that this pain can be converted, as it were, by accepting “the fundamental impermanence of all things.” This acceptance bewilders me:
sometimes it seems an act of will; at others, of surrender. Often I feel myself to be rocking between them (seasickness).”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“I don’t know why an individual has to be treated as less-than and strive to fit society’s standards when it’s the people who denigrate
others who are the real problem. That frustrates me. That I can’t step out of this frame, that I still feel inferior when I meet someone supposedly superior to me, and that I feel confident and comfortable when I meet someone supposedly inferior – I
absolutely loathe that about myself.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“I squat there and think about how you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them. Sometimes you mix the two up in a terrible tangle that’s hard to unravel.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“Well then, it is as you please. This is the dysfunction talking. This is the disease talking. This is how much I miss you talking. This is the deepest blue, talking, talking, always talking to you.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets