Frances

“Being able to skip two seconds could be quite useful–if you picked the right two seconds. Like when you're at the dinner table with your parents and your mom has just said something sarcastic about your dad being passed over for promotion, and you just know your father is about to let out a brief but lethal burst of resentment. You need godlike timing to pick the exact instant when the barb is being launched. There are a hundred leading indicators: the scent of overcooked casserole, the sensation of the room's temperature dropping slightly. The ticking of the stove, powering down. You can leave reality behind and reappear for the aftermath.”
― Charlie Jane Anders, All the Birds in the Sky

“Human fear has a terrible power. It changes everything, distorts everything, maddens everything. Fear is the dark womb where monsters are born and thrive.”
― Frances Hardinge, Deeplight

“never unlearned to respond to attack by turning to stone. Looking back now, I wonder how many of the problems in my marriage were due to . . . well.” She smiled, and blinked. “My mother was wrong, I think. She certainly ignored her own pain for far too long. But I’m stone all the way through, now, and it’s too late.” Miles bit his knuckles, hard. Right. So at the dawn of puberty, she’d learned no one would defend her, she could not defend herself, and the only way to survive was to pretend to be dead. Great.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Komarr

“Then Beren woke and opened eyes,
and rose and cried: 'Neath other skies,
in lands more awful and unknown,
I wandered long, methought, alone
to the deep shadow where the dead dwell;
but ever a voice that I knew well,
like bells, like viols, like harps, like birds,
like music moving without words,
called me, called me through the night,
enchanted drew me back to light!”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, Beren and Lúthien