Chase Thompson

“We do not look back, Chaol. It helps no one and nothing to look back. We can only go on.”
There she was, that queen looking out at him, a hint of the ruler she was becoming. And it knocked the breath out of him, because it made him feel so strangely young—when she now seemed so old. “What if we go on,” he said, “only to more pain and despair? What if we go on, only to find a horrible end waiting for us?”
Aelin looked northward, as if she could see all the way to Terrasen. “Then it is not the end.”
― Sarah J. Maas, Queen of Shadows

“So if it wasn’t fate, what brought you to the concert tonight?”
. . . .
..he said, “You.”

“Me?”

He nodded. “Yes, you.”

“But you didn’t know you’d meet me.”

“A meaningless detail. Fate works forward, backward, and crisscrosses sideways and couldn’t care less how we scan its purposes with our rickety little befores and afters.”
― André Aciman, Find Me

“Oh, but we do age. We don’t grow up.”
― André Aciman, Find Me

“I loved these salt rivers more than I loved the sea; I loved the movement of tides more than I loved the fury of surf. Something in me was congruent with this land, something affirmed when I witnessed the startled, piping rush of shrimp or the flash of starlight on the scales of mullet. I could feel myself relax and change whenever I returned to the lowcountry and saw the vast green expanses of marsh, feminine as lace, delicate as calligraphy. The lowcountry had its own special ache and sting.”
― Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline