bookquotesforthesoul

[bookquotesforthesoul]

An overly skilled lover was kind of icky – desire should make you clumsy.

-Miranda July, All Fours

[bookquotesforthesoul]

I wasn't fatter or thinner; I'd incarnated. Of course I had always been in there, but so gingerly, like a person never wanting to unpack even though they're obviously going to be staying awhile. Now my brain was spread out over my whole body, not just in my head. I had achieved this through this brute, relentless lifting and lowering, which made sense – you couldn't think your way to a physical place, you had to go there.

-Miranda July, All Fours

[bookquotesforthesoul]

Part one done of a five-part lunch. The problem wasn't the lunch, it was what came after, the whole rest of my life.

-Miranda July, All Fours

[bookquotesforthesoul]

I could suddenly see that while we had been very, very intimate, we had not communicated very thoroughly. That part of us had not been called to the table.

-Miranda July, All Fours

[bookquotesforthesoul]

Oh, life! Such a trickster! Always teaching you a lesson! I didn't bother working out what the lesson was.

-Miranda July, All Fours

[bookquotesforthesoul]

It was my first time seeing white people dance outside of television and for what it's worth I thought it was very brave.

-Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Catalina

[bookquotesforthesoul]

I felt flattered and humiliated. I wanted to be loved and admired, but I did not want to be talked about.

-Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Catalina

[bookquotesforthesoul]

I can't say that I liked the flavor, but I don't really think American cuisine is about flavor, it's like a stand against communism.

-Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Catalina

[bookquotesforthesoul]

My God, I just remembered that we die. But – but me too?! Don't forget that for now it's strawberry season. Yes.

-Clarice Lispector, Hour of the Star

[bookquotesforthesoul]

Years earlier, I'd done a ritual with friends under a full moon in Wyoming, all of us standing in a circle, holding out empty purses and wallets, making requests of the universe. I asked for something that seemed mature - wishing for creative fulfillment, rather than external markers of success; something like that. Then the guy beside me asked for a motorcycle. Which is to say: Don't want what you're supposed to want. Want what you want.

-Leslie Jamison, Splinters

[bookquotesforthesoul]

Not for the first time, I listened to the voice of my mother and looked at the face of my daughter and thought: There is no end to this love. It will tug at your sleeve until you die.

-Leslie Jamison, Splinters

[bookquotesforthesoul]

My life was barely my own anymore; I shared custody of all my feelings with Spotify.

-Leslie Jamison, Splinters

[bookquotesforthesoul]

It was not the number of years we spent up there but the years they were. Even when someone told a hurtful joke or broke a dish or was ordered to leave the room because she's so bad at cards, she's lucky she doesn't get fired for being an imbecile, joy was the dominant twin. It absorbed everything.

-Sloane Crosley, Grief is For People

[bookquotesforthesoul]

Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it.

-Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

[bookquotesforthesoul]

It's easy for people who have sacrificed nothing to rationalize their own ordinariness by calling me lucky. But I sacrificed my entire life; I sold it to the abyss. And the abyss gave me art.

-Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

[bookquotesforthesoul]

It's simple to cut things out of a life. You break up with a shitty partner, quit eating bread, delete the Twitter app. You cut it out, and the shape of what's actually killing you clarifies a little.

-Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

[bookquotesforthesoul]

That's when everything became supersaturated. One of those memories you can squeeze like a rag and watch details drip and pool.

-Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!