Alyssa

“I have become something wonderful, she thought. I have become something terrible. Was she now a goddess or a monster? Perhaps neither. Perhaps both.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“You didn’t come.”

“You didn’t call.”

She looks down at their tangled hands. “Tell me, Luc,” she says. “Was any of it real?”

“What is real to you, Adeline? Since my love counts for nothing?”

“You are not capable of love.”

He scowls, his eyes flashing emerald. “Because I am not human? Because I do not wither and die?”

“No,” she says, drawing back her hand. “You are not capable of love because you cannot understand what it is to care for someone else more than yourself. If you loved me, you would have let me go by now.”

Luc flicks his fingers. “What nonsense,” he says. “It is because I love you that I won’t. Love is hungry. Love is selfish.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Don't you remember, she told him then, when you were nothing but shadow and smoke?
Darling, he'd said in his soft, rich way, I was the night itself.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“And she wonders what it was that drew her here the first time.
Wonders if they are like magnets, she and Luc.
If they have circled each other for so long that now they share an orbit.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue