Calissa

“The world just felt smaller without you…Or maybe you have a way of making the world feel bigger.”
― Ann Liang, I Am Not Jessica Chen

“Because it’s been a painfully short life, the blink of an eye, a single summer’s day. Ted’s chest hurts, like crying without oxygen, because grief does so many strange things to people, and one of those things is that we forget how to breathe. As if the body’s first instinct is to grieve itself to death. Soon Ted will stand up and discover that he’s forgotten how to walk too, that happens to us all when the love of our life falls asleep for the last time, because when the soul leaves the body, evidently the last thing it does is tie our shoelaces together. In the weeks following the death we trip over thin air. It’s the soul’s fault.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“Isn’t one of those Labors going down to hell?”

“There and back,” said Lieutenant Colonel Hupfer. “As I indicated to Ms. de la Peña, it’s a tough world, Beal.”

He leaned down over me and whispered, so quietly that no one else could hear, “But I think you already know that.”
― Gary D. Schmidt, The Labors of Hercules Beal

“This is the way you hold on. This is the way you dig your fingernails in.

If you'd known to do this before, you would've helped your mom wash the dishes. You would've put down the book. You would've told your dad the papers could wait.

You would've held Aiko as she cried.”
― Traci Chee, We Are Not Free