Anja

“Point is, you gotta be scared. Fear protects you. You gotta be scared right down to your bones" - he touched his fingertips to her collarbone - "for bravery to mean anything.”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“it’s hard not to see. You’re the kind of pair that makes everyone around them feel as though they’re missing out on a private joke.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“As she fell, Esther wasn’t worried about being blown off course and plummeting into the rocks below. She wasn’t worried about hitting the shallows and pin diving to the ocean floor and shattering her spine. She wasn’t even worried about Cthulhu. (Okay, maybe a little.) What she worried about was Eugene’s willingness to jump. The way he glanced down at the water far below and looked at it like it was home. The way he stepped lightly from the cliff’s edge, and the way he fell through the air faster than she did, dragged down by earth’s magnetic field. The way he flickered in the sunlight as he hit the water, the same way Tyler Durden flashed on-screen four times before you saw him solidly. Foreshadowing the twist to come. Eugene was afraid of demons, and monsters, and above all the dark, but he was not afraid of death. That scared her more than anything.”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

“Anxiety felt like a grapnel anchor had been pickaxed into your back, one prong in each lung, one through the heart, one through the spine, the weight curving your posture forward, dragging you down to the murky depths of the sea floor. The good news was that you kind of got used to it after a while. Got used to the gasping, brink-of-heart-attack feeling that followed you everywhere. All you had to do was grab one of the prongs that stuck out from the bottom of your sternum, give it a little shake, and say, “Listen, asshole. We’re not dying. We have shit to do.”
― Krystal Sutherland, A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares