Jackie Keller

“I should have known: destiny is a pretty story we tell ourselves. Lurking beneath it there are only people, and the terrible choices we make.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“I decided then to tell Artichoke to be ugly. To make herself as ugly as possible and not worry too much about beauty or what anyone thought of her. To be unpainted, to live in the breeze and stand under waterfalls and not be worried over the height of mountains, of quiet trails deep in the woods. To not be scared of roads slick with rain, of valleys dry in drought. I'd tell her 'no fear' and she'd know it was the deepest truth and she would be everything I was not. She would be wild and free. And I wouldn't worry because I knew the secret. That through all of her ugliness, all her hiking and running and jumping and falling and getting back up and saying no and saying what she wanted, her scraped hands, her freckled skin, her smart brain, she would of course be beautiful.”
― Chelsea Bieker, Godshot

“Maybe there's something quietly revolutionary in not longing to be beautiful.”
― Dana Czapnik, The Falconer

“...he has so much he wants to tell the boy, but most important, maybe, is this: life makes monsters of everyone, but it's always possible to come back. Pain and death are real, but so are love, and family, and forgiveness.”
― Shaun Hamill, A Cosmology of Monsters