Clare O'Brien

“He hated saying those words, not just because they were true or because admitting them meant Victor was a step ahead, but because he couldn’t not say them, because the confession crawled its way up his throat before he thought to swallow.”
― V.E. Schwab, Vicious

“Without Caroline, he had nothing. Without Caroline, he was nothing. Maybe this was the truest definition of love he’d ever experienced. Not the kind he’d experienced with Lillian, the kind that unhinged him, made him wild. But the kind that had the power to anchor and secure him, to make him become the man he ought to have been all along.”
― Alma Katsu, The Deep

“She, like her friends, had been groomed and bred to wed princelings. Being a debutante was a blood sport. And she had succeeded, gotten the richest man in the world to propose to her. It made her the envy of all her friends. One even had a nervous breakdown over it.”
― Alma Katsu, The Deep

“Miss Austen’s novels … seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer … is marriageableness.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson