Kell Gray

“Don’t know if there even is such a thing as “worse” when it comes to grief. I’ve kind of come to think of grief the same way you might think about drowning. Drowning is drowning, some people might be drowning for longer than others, some drowning might put you on a whole new path once you’re through it, sometimes it might change how your brain works if you’re cut off from oxygen for long enough, could even cost you your life—the severity of the drowning incident might be scalable but the drowning itself, the grief itself, it’s all water you can’t breathe in.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“I think Nesta feels everything— sees too much; sees and feels it all. And she burns with it. Keeping that wall up helps from being overwhelmed, from caring too greatly.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury

“Wherever she is, it’s good. I know it is.” “How?” I ask. He shrugs like it’s easy. “Because she’s there.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“Grief is funny like that, how it ebbs and flows from you, it’s not corked like champagne, a bottle that bursts open, fizzes all out until it’s empty. It’s more like a kind of weather. A kind of wind. Sometimes it’s these horrible gusts that you feel undeniably, hurts your ears, makes you close your eyes, chills you right down to your bones, some days it’s a pleasant breeze that blows across your face and it’s neither sad or bad, it’s just some kind of unspeakable tenderness. Some days you feel no breeze, that’s started happening to me—I don’t know how I feel about it yet—not that I don’t think of her, I sort of think I’ll think of her every day for forever, but more that, when I do, it doesn’t necessarily feel like someone’s dropping a crystal vase inside my chest. That’s not to say I don’t still have days where I’m a glassware shop situated somewhere along the San Andreas Fault and there’s an earthquake and things are falling and breaking everywhere, but there was a time where every day felt like the big one California’s waiting for—just total demolition. I suppose it doesn’t feel like total destruction anymore.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark