Zoi

“She had been terrifed of anything that might hold her where she was, that might chain her where she couldn't flee. She had fashioned herself into an escape artist, a magician whose only trick was vanishing. Permanence was dangerous. It had always felt like a trap.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“What is a mermaid but a woman half-drowned,
What a selkie but an unwilling wife,
What a tale but a sea-net, snatching up both From the gentle tumult of dark waves?”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“In the end I learned that the water was in me. It was a ghost that could not be exorcised. But a guest, even uninvited, must be attended to. You make up a bed for them. You pour from your best bottle of wine. If you can learn to love that wich despises you, you can dance on the shore and play in the waves again, like you did when you were young. Before the ocean is friend or foe, it simply is. And so are you.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“It occurs to me that I’ve been mourning two people all these years—the mother I had, and the mother I wish I had—and that neither of them was the one who kept a roof over my head.”
― Alix E. Harrow, Starling House