The Retreat Quotes

“What you're looking for is on the other side of fear.”
― Insha Juneja, Imperfect Mortals : A Collection of Short Stories

“He and Hattie had once been genuinely close, but ever since puberty, Jasper had been reduced to the level of a satellite, watching his friends as they breezed through their adolescence. He’d always taken a detached interest in it all, thinking, in his anxious disconnect from the others, that he was somehow better off compared to them – but, all in all, he had little to show for his time on this Earth, apart from just sort of being ‘there’.”
― Louis Saunders, The Retreat

“The crowd clapped and cheered with thunderous applause. Some of the adults had begun to wail, including Hattie. All that pain – the loss of her friends, their betrayals, and the life she’d been denied by that terrible pandemic – that excruciating pain pulsed through her veins and made its way out her lungs, screaming, screaming and screaming, hysterically, as she ceded control to that wonderful orator. Commander Tommy’s words were like a song, the way he composed them.”
― Louis Saunders, The Retreat