"I contemplated the skyline this double feeling came to me as one thought, pressing in from either side of the bridge, impossible for me to reconcile: It is ludicrous for anyone to live here and I can never leave."
-Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler

"Sometimes my sadness felt so deep it must have been inherited.  It had a refrain, and though I evened out my breathing by the time I got to First Avenue, the refrain wouldn't leave me.  It was guttural and illogical and I repeated it endlessly like a chant: Please don't leave me, please don't leave me, please don't leave me.  All the way home, against the bored, anorexic kids on Bedford Avenue, against the lurid tinkling of bodega music, and the dull thunder of the J train on the bridge.  I heard myself say it out loud when I got into my bedroom.  I kicked the mattress that lay on the floor.  That's when I realized how far away I was.  I saw the ravine.  I had traveled a great distance, just one stop away.  Please don't leave me.  I guess it made sense - I had never felt more alone."
-Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler

"Does anyone come to New York clean?  I'm afraid not.  But crossing the Hudson I thought of crossing Lethe, milky river of forgetting.  I forgot that I had a mother who drove away before I could open my eyes, and a father who moved invisibility through the rooms of our house.  I forgot the parade of people in my life as thin as mesh screens, who couldn't catch whatever it was I wanted to say to them, and I forgot how I drove down dirt roads between desiccated fields, under an oppressive guard of stars, and felt nothing.

Yes, I'd come to escape, but from what?  The twin pillars of football and church?  The low, faded homes on childless cul-de-sacs  Mornings of the Gazette and boxed doughnuts?  The sedated, sentimental middle of it?  It didn't matter.  I would never know exactly, for my life, like most, moved only imperceptibly and definitely forward."
-Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler