Heather

“And after all those hours in the locker room, all those nights on the team bus, all the conversations and all the jokes and the blood, sweat, and tears, the boy didn’t dare tell his coach his biggest secret. That’s betrayal. David knows it’s a huge betrayal. There’s no other way to explain how much a grown man must have failed as a person if such a warrior of a boy could believe that his coach would be less proud of him if he were gay. David hates himself for not being better than his dad. That’s the job of sons.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“Bravery is being unafraid of something other people are afraid of. Courage is being afraid, but strong enough to do it anyway.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere

“I am telling myself what I most need to hear. That I’m human, and humans make mistakes.”
― Lara Love Hardin, The Many Lives of Mama Love: A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing

“And they don’t have any female friends, and there are no women’s teams here, so they learn that hockey only belongs to them, and their coaches teach them that girls are a “distraction.” So they learn that girls only exist for fucking. She wants to point out how all the old men in this town praise them for “fighting” and “not backing down,” but not one single person tells them that when a girl says no, it means NO. And the problem with this town is not only that a boy raped a girl, but that everyone is pretending that he DIDN’T do it. So now all the other boys will think that what he did was okay. Because no one cares.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown