Michaela

“She recognized the strange happiness that came from loving something without knowing why you did, that strange happiness that was sometimes so big that it felt like sadness.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys

“There was a feeling I got before I spoke in front of an audience and sometimes also before an event that was less public but still important, an event that could have consequences in my life - taking the LSATs, for example, which I'd done in a classroom on the campus of Harvard. The feeling was a focused kind of anticipation, it was like a weight inside my chest, but it never exactly came from being nervous. I always had prepared, and I always knew I could do it. Thus the feeling was a sense of my competence blended with the knowledge that I was about to pull off a feat most people thought, correctly or not, they couldn't. And this knowledge contributed to the final aspect of the feeling, which was loneliness - the loneliness of being good at something.”
― Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham

“They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People