Jennifer Mitchell

“But no matter how awful life was, I would never want to give up. I would always want to keep living. Just waiting for that moment when it might get better. You need to remember that, Marge. You must never give up again.” She touched her belly. “We are not the things that happened to us. We can be what we like.”
― Rachel Joyce, Miss Benson's Beetle

“And, after all, what did it mean? Home? Suppose it was not the place you came from, but a thing you carried with you, like a suitcase. And you could lose your suitcase, she knew that now. You could open another person’s luggage, and put on their clothes, and though you might feel different at first, out of your depth, something inside you was the same, and even a little more true to itself, a little more free.”
― Rachel Joyce, Miss Benson's Beetle

“It’s winter that raises the apple from the earth. The bitter cold, the ice like knives, the crystals of ice underground that cut into the hard coat and breach the soft, pale place inside where root and stem and leaf are one. The apple won’t be coddled. Until it knows true suffering, the seed won’t sprout at all. The tree will never live.”
― Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow