Anna

“It’s easy to be brave. Harder to know when not to fight.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“Helios stopped talking and stared up at the ceiling. ‘I’ve always been a disappointment.’ Icarus couldn’t say that Helios wasn’t, he couldn’t say it was going to be okay because he didn’t know if it would be, he didn’t have a paragraph of loving words that he’d rehearsed the way Helios did. He only had the truth. ‘I want you anyway.’ Then, softer, ‘I’ll want you still, all the same.”
― K. Ancrum, Icarus

“You know how before you die, they say your life flashes before your eyes? Well, just so you know, that also happens when you come your brains out with your fingers in your ass, screaming for your dad to fuck you in his shower, then walk into his bedroom and realize he heard every word.”
― Honey London, Call Me Daddy

“Unfortunately, the more time he [Gaunt] spent with Elisabeth, the more apparent it became how fruitless it was to try to want her. He could appreciate her beauty in an artistic sense, as if she were a sculpture in a museum, but it was a flat, textureless sort of admiration. If love was stepping off a cliff in the hope of flying, there was a wall at the precipice that had never been there with Sandys, or Ellwood, or even Devi, whom Gaunt had helplessly adored at thirteen. He felt no fear around Elisabeth, because there was no chance of falling. He was fond of her, but he would never say to her, '"Withhold no atom's atom of I die!”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam