"'Magic doesn't require beauty,' she said.  'Easy magic is pretty.  Great magic asks that you trouble the waters.  It requires a disruption, something new."
-Language of Thorns by Leigh Bardugo

"There's such a lot of different Annes in me.  I sometimes think that is why I'm such a troublesome person.  If I was just the one Anne it would be ever so much more comfortable, but then it wouldn't be half so interesting."
-Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

"This is why I run. 

Because caring was a thing with claws.  It sank them in, and didn't let go.  Caring hurt more than a knife to the leg, more than a few broken ribs, more than anything that bled or broke and healed again.  Caring didn't break you clean.  It was a bone that didn't set, a cut that wouldn't close."
-A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab

"father.  you always call to say nothing in particular.  you ask what i'm doing or where i am and when the silence stretches like a lifetime between us i scramble to find questions to keep the conversation going.  what i long to say most is.  i understand this world broke you.  it has been so hard on your feet.  i don't blame you for not knowing how to remain soft with me.  sometimes i stay up thinking of all the places you are hurting which you'll never care to mention.  i come from the same aching blood.  from the same bone so desperate for attention i collapse in on myself.  i am your daughter.  i know the small talk is the only way you know how to tell me you love me.  cause it is the only way i know how to tell you."
-milk & honey by rupi kaur

"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