maud she/her 

“I don’t think you’ve ever felt anything that didn’t hurt you,” Julian said. “We’ve found each other, out of everyone else in the world. Does that hurt, too?”

“Beautiful things are supposed to hurt. It’s what I was saying earlier—even if you don’t know how you’re going to create something that matters, you can still want to do it so badly you can barely think about anything else—”

Paul could only forgive himself for keeping a journal if he told himself he was documenting history. He wrote it for an audience, one who would only read it after the end of a life he’d made significant. He imagined a future biographer poring through his juvenilia for the signs of future greatness, and how that person would perceive the moments of weakness and self-indulgence in between. In hindsight his frustrations and fears would be taken as evidence that he was still human—but in the present, before he’d made anything of himself, they meant he was only human.