Mindy

“I have been so many different people, played so many different roles in my life. I am not a person. I am a crowd in one body.
I was people I hated and people I admired. I was exciting and boring and happy and infinitely sad. I was both on the right and wrong side of history.
I had, in short, lost myself.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“Omai strokes water off his board. “No. Not for me. Love is where you find the meaning. Those seven years I was with her contained more than anything else. Do you understand? You can take all the years before and since and weigh them next to those, and they wouldn't stand a chance. That's the thing with time, isn't it? It's not all the same. Some days - some years - some decades - are empty. There is nothing to them. It's just flat water. And then you come across a year, or even a day, or an afternoon. And it is everything. It is the whole thing.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles...How the epithets pile up. We never called him any of those things; we called him "the butcher.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“When the war is over, will you still love me?
In that moment, the realization crystallized, and his focus narrowed to the one truth that had come so plainly to his mind. She was the only thing in the world he really wanted. And not in the way most men want women. He didn't want to assuage a need. He didn't want to lose himself temporarily in her body. He wanted to live for her. Beyond the moment, beyond the war. Always.
He'd entered a place, or maybe he'd been walking toward it, or around it, all his life, but the dragons he'd once sought to slay were not the same. The dragons of lust and vanity and greed. The dragons of selfishness and ambition. The dragons of mortality and the need for power. Those dragons were gone, and in their place was unconditional love and a desire to sacrifice and submit, to lay down every need and ambition, for someone else. For Eva. The gospel of love and peace he'd suffered to impart and the God he'd struggled to serve were still the same. The difference was in Angelo.”
― Amy Harmon, From Sand and Ash