Amanda

“is nothing like that. In real life, it’s an age-old punishment used by the most brutal regimes in history to keep even the strongest men and women “in their place”: subjugated and helpless and humiliated and terrified. I’ve been in that place, and I’ve learned that it’s not difficult to break the body, or the mind, or even the spirit. Nobody is stronger than pain. Once you find yourself at the mercy of another’s calculated cruelty, you very quickly lose part of yourself. As soon as the body takes over, you become animal, unthinking, instinctive, desperately trying to escape, and the part of you that was you, the part that held your pride and your heart and your strength, is lost—at least for a while, and sometimes forever.”
― Ripley Harper, Chaosbringer

“Some people need a starfish in the face. It does them good.”
― K.M. Shea, The Little Selkie

“Pain, fear…they can turn you into something you were never meant to be.”
― Jennifer Donnelly, Beauty and the Beast: Lost in a Book