“Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me — so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her.”

– Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“We had fallen in love; that was still true. But given the right psychological conditions, a person could fall in love with anyone or anything. A wooden desk—always on all fours, always prone, always there for you. What was the lifespan of these improbable loves? An hour. A week. A few months at best. The end was a natural thing, like the seasons, like getting older, fruit turning. That was the saddest part—there was no one to blame and no way to reverse it.”

– Miranda July, The First Bad Man

“You know, a heart can be broken, but it still keeps a-beating just the same.”

– Fannie Flagg, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle-Stop Cafe

“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.”

– Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“It seemed like someone was always leaving someone, like that’s the way the world worked—people were born and people died, people left and people came. It was like the world was saying you can’t have everything you want at the same time.”

– Jacqueline Woodson, Lena

“The more I thought about it, it made sense that these adult women worked hard on their friendships, even when sex and romantic love weren’t part of the equation. It made me wonder about all the ways that we are able to love each other and how movies and TV make it seem like you have to discard people once they break your heart or once the love disappears. Maybe that was a horrible lie, a complete disservice to real love. Maybe those women in that house were renegades and I needed to take notice.”

– Gabby Rivera, Juliet Takes a Breath

“I believe in the remade life, the possibilities inherent in our lesbian and gay chosen families, our families of friends and lovers, the healing that can take place among the most wounded of us. My family of friends has kept me alive through lovers who have left, enterprises that have failed, and all too many stories that never got finished. That family has been part of remaking the world for me.”

– Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking About Sex, Class, and Literature

“I found my fingers once again on my breast bone, probing and chafing, searching for the thickening organ behind it. This time, however, it seemed to me that I found it. There was a darkness, a heaviness, a stillness, at the very centre of me, that I had not known was growing there, but which gave me, now, a kind of comfort. My breast felt tight and sore —but I didn’t writhe, or sweat, beneath the pain fo it, rather, I crossed my arms over my ribs, and embraced my dark and thickened heart like a lover.”

– Sarah Waters, Tipping the Velvet

“I couldn’t tell you that you can’t re-do a thing that’s been undone. I couldn’t tell you anything that you would understand. I couldn’t tell you that it wasn’t just the fact that you had ripped it out of me and taken it and mounted it, then left with it then lost it, how it wasn’t only that, but it was more. How it was that when you asked me, I believed you and I told you yes. How, though I had tried a long time to replace what you had hacked away from me, I never could undo the action of your doing so, that I had, and only ever would have, more belief in your faulty memory, your stupid sloppy foresight, than in your claims of change. How I believed, yes, I believed with all my heart, that given time, you’d do something else again. And then I thought, but this was only half a thought, that even if you had changed, no really really changed, truly and at last, and even if you knew me better than I know myself, and even if I’m better off than I’ve ever been, and even if this was the only way we could have gotten to this special place where we are now, and even if there’s a reason, darling, something bigger than both of us, and even if all these even if’s are true, that I would never believe you again, never forget what I know of you, never forget what you’ve done to me, what you will do, I’ll never believe the myth of forgiveness between us.”

– Rebecca Brown, The Terrible Girls

“There’s no return for them, nothing left to rekindle. Isabel knows it. They can go on being cordial and affectionate. They can worry together about the children. They can even desire happiness, each for the other, but they are no longer lovers, they are no longer married, which, by way of a transition, is all the more final for having escaped their attention, for having occurred in increments, like a leak that goes undetected until the day it becomes apparent that the whole structure has been saturated, so full of moisture and mildew that it can no longer be repaired.”

– Michael Cunningham, Day: A Novel

“After Brynn left, I thought about transitions a lot. The sameness, the dullness of everything. How nothing in my life ever felt like it was moving fast enough, but at the same time I couldn’t stand to leave the one place where Brynn had left me. The last place we’d loved each other

Limbo to me felt like remembering the pain. The memory of slamming your fingers in a car door or smashing your littlest toe into a wall. It was the shivery feeling you got if you remembered ramming your shin into a desk. You could remember feelings over and over again and they never changed or got any better. They always hurt the same, and it seemed they always would.”

– Kristen Arnett, Mostly Dead Things

“Our abrupt ending left me feeling abandoned, and the pain of it was unbearable. I needed an explanation. I needed to know that it wasn’t my fault.”

– Zaina Arafat, You Exist Too Much

“Carol was walking slowly away, past the Ritz Tower doorway, and on. And that was the way it should be, Therese thought, not with a lingering handclasp, not with backward glances.”

– Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“I have always known I would have to live without her. But the how, how I might do that, has not crossed my mind until now. To face myself, alone.”

– K Patrick, Mrs. S

“Not to imply that by the time it came, our final breakup was anything close to bearable. A condemned building experiencing its final demolition. Maria pulling the trigger, saying, face spasming with pain, I cannot do this anymore.

Not to gloss over the subsequent period for which my mother finally flew to D.C. and forced me to bathe and eat and go to work each day.

Nothing is implied here besides the opiate nature of time. Besides the fact that after it all went down, we had regard for each other, grudging respect, an ocean-deep understanding of the other person, and not mutual vision of romantic continuity.”

– Sarah Thankam Mathews, All This Could Be Different

“I couldn’t get away from the spirit of Delores that haunted my apartment and clawed its way back into my mind. Every time I sat in that place, the demon took hold. The only thing that led me away from my pain was to think about Charlotte. Then I could forget who I was.”

– Sarah Schulman, After Dolores