Quote by Sally Rooney

“To love, and for his love to be accepted, yes. It was in fact painful, the relief of all that compression suddenly, to say the words aloud, and hear her saying them, to be loved by her, it was so needed that it actually hurt. Not even a feeling of unmixed happiness, but of happiness that was strongly and confusingly mixed with many other feelings. Sadness, missing his father, and a kind of shame somehow because each passing day seemed to bring Ivan further away from him and the life they used to have together. A life that was receding increasingly into the past--into the realm of childhood and adolescence. The realization that his adulthood, into which he was entering now so definitively, and which would last all the rest of his life, would have to be lived without his father. That he was becoming a person his father would never know.”

Quote by Sally Rooney