Olivia

“Those who cannot conceive of Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“This time I read the title of the painting: Girl Interrupted at Her Music. Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that?”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“I think back to Astrick's arrival at the Pyre and to the first time I saw his lanterns illuminated. I think of the night he taught me to make candles, remembering how his jacket had been thrown over my shoulders when I had fallen into much needed sleep. I think of his face when he had stood bound and beaten, but still determined. I remember the times I had cried and raged and broken, and he had set his jaw and had listened, then had spoken of courage. I think of the way he had held Sperro in the stables. Their private conversations that Astrick has honored. Everything Astrick has created is beautiful, yes, but it is really the power he has carried with him that I have marveled at, always extending beyond himself for whoever had needed it.”
― Beth Brower, The Beast of Ten

“Just as people tailor their stories to serve their interests - revising, erasing, embroidering - so do nations. After all the grim and troubling narratives about the Wager disaster, and after all the death and destruction, the empire had finally found its mythic tale of the sea.”
― David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder