Shane

“Every age had its losses, they said, even youth, which lost first childhood, then youth too. And all first things were vivid, including losses. “Just keep learning,” the old woman said.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora

“Everyone’s scared all the time. That’s the thing you’ve got to tell yourself. They might be scared of different things from you. Things that don’t scare you a bit. Like heights, or failure, or wanting to piss then not being able to go. But everyone’s scared of something. And even if they’re not, it helps to think they are. The brave ones are just good at pretending, and pretending’s just lying by another name,”
― Joe Abercrombie, The Devils

“I wanted to go on sitting there, not talking, not listening to the others, keeping the moment precious for all time, because we were peaceful all of us, we were content and drowsy even as the bee who droned above our heads. In a little while it would be different, there would come tomorrow, and the next day and another year. And we would be changed perhaps, never sitting quite like this again. Some of us would go away, or suffer, or die, the future stretched away in front of us, unknown, unseen, not perhaps what we wanted, not what we planned. This moment was safe though, this could not be touched. Here we sat together, Maxim and I, hand-in-hand, and the past and the future mattered not at all. This was secure, this funny little fragment of time he would never remember, never think about again…For them it was just after lunch, quarter-past-three on a haphazard afternoon, like any hour, like any day. They did not want to hold it close, imprisoned and secure, as I did. They were not afraid.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“He saw it in her eyes. The anguish, the frustration. The terrible nothing that clawed inside and sought to smother her. She knew. It was there, inside. She had been broken.

Then she smiled. Oh, storms. She smiled anyway.

It was the single most beautiful thing he’d seen in his entire life.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance