Lauren

“No, no—there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don’t know what I don’t see—what I don’t fear!”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“When you're a child trapped in a situation of physical or psychological deprivation, you learn shame as an efficient, elegant mechanism of survival: shame simultaneously shields you from the reality that danger is our of your control (since the problem is not that you're unloved and deprived; it's that you're Bad) and prevents you from doing or saying anything challenging that might provoke a threat.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes from the End of the World

“Seize the wind," I whispered. "Don't become the kite that never flies.”
― Elizabeth Lim, Spin the Dawn

“But time has a way of folding itself, like a map, distances and journeys and hours and minutes tucked neatly away to leave just the realness of the before and the now, as close as hands pressed on the either side of a rice-paper door.”
― Natasha Ngan, Girls of Paper and Fire