Hannah Grace

“I expect you’ve seen the footage: elephants, finding the bones of one of their own kind dropped by the wayside, picked clean by scavengers and the sun, then untidily left there, decide to do something about it. But what, exactly? They can’t, of course, reassemble the old elephant magnificence; they can’t even make a tidier heap. But they can hook up bones with their trunks and chuck them this way and that way. So they do. And their scattering has an air of deliberate ritual, ancient and necessary. Their great size, too, makes them the very embodiment of grief, while the play of their trunks lends sprezzatura. Elephants puzzling out the anagram of their own anatomy, elephants at their abstracted lamentations – may their spirit guide me as I place my own sad thoughts in new, hopeful arrangements. – A Scattering, Christopher Reid”
― Dolly Alderton, Good Material

“We were allowed to be strong or feminine, but only if we folded ourselves into a very specific idea of what either of those things meant. In a man's world, strong and feminine were rarely synonymous. Fu*k that”
― Emma C. Wells, This Girl's a Killer

“The group you’re after—all I can tell you is that they believe that some situations require a gently guiding hand and others a gilded blade.”
― Jennifer Lynn Barnes, Glorious Rivals

“You are no one's weapon, Lyra," Grayson said, his tone making it perfectly clear just how rarely he lost arguments of any kind, "bomb or otherwise, and you are certainly not a pawn."
"Then what am I?" Lyra retorted, her gaze returning to his like a homing missile.
"You are lethal," Grayson said quietly, "in the best possible way.”
― Jennifer Lynn Barnes, Glorious Rivals