Girlhood This Girlhood That. Woman You Are 26

– Emily Dickinson, from Manuscript #842

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first.

- Jim Morrison

#PersonalRevolution

“But even when I am afraid, I keep on trusting you.”

— Psalm 56:3

Ta-Nehisi Coates, from Between the World and Me

Text ID: The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free.

the roy family + "anthem" by noah hawley

Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Jonathan Safran Foer

Madeline Miller, Circe

Richard Siken, Crush

“If only we’d stop trying to be happy we’d have a pretty good time.”

Edith Wharton

Slavoj Žižek

Richard Siken, Crush

Barbarian (2022)

— Elena Ferrante, from “The Days of Abandonment.”