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“Walking around, even on a bad day, I would see things â€� I mean just the things that were in front of me. People’s faces, the weather, traffic. The smell of petrol from the garage, the feeling of being rained on, completely ordinary things. And in that way even the bad days were good, because I felt them and remembered feeling them. There was something delicate about living like that â€� like I was an instrument and the world touched me and reverberated inside me.

After a couple of months, I started to miss days. Sometimes I would fall asleep without remembering to write anything, but then other nights I’d open the book and not know what to write â€� I wouldn’t be able to think of anything at all. When I did make entries, they were increasingly verbal and abstract: song titles, or quotes from novels, or text messages from friends. By spring I couldn’t keep it up anymore. I started to put the diary away for weeks at a time â€� it was just a cheap black notebook I got at work â€� and then eventually I’d take it back out to look at the entries from the previous year. At that point, I found it impossible to imagine ever feeling again as I had apparently once felt about rain or flowers. It wasn’t just that I failed to be delighted by sensory experiences â€� it was that I didn’t actually seem to have them anymore. I would walk to work or go out for groceries or whatever and by the time I came home again I wouldn’t be able to remember seeing or hearing anything distinctive at all. I suppose I was seeing but not looking â€� the visual world just came to me flat, like a catalogue of information. I never looked at things anymore, in the way I had before.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“For my birthday, you wrote down one hundred things you loved about me. "[...] 92. I love what a good mother you'll be one day."
'Why do you think I'll be a good mother?' I put down the list and felt for a moment like maybe you didn't know me at all.”
― Ashley Audrain, The Push

“Why can humans not use their millions of words to simply tell one another what they desire?”
― Shelby Van Pelt, Remarkably Bright Creatures

“and nothing about my life â€� the job, the apartment, the desires, the love affairs â€� struck me as permanent. I felt anything was possible, that there were no doors shut behind me, and that out there somewhere, as yet unknown, there were people who would love and admire me and want to make me happy. Maybe that explains in some way the openness I felt toward the world â€� maybe without knowing it, I was anticipating my future, I was watching for signs.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful world, where are you