Angel Hench

“Let that be a lesson to you: If you are too good and too quiet for too long, it will cost you. It will always cost you, in the end.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“Because you trust your house, right? It's your house. It protects you from the world and, even more important, all the people out there. It sees you naked every day. It knows your sins. It's the only place where you are your true self. So when that gets corrupted, when that becomes haunted, that's terrifying.”
― J.W. Ocker, Twelve Nights at Rotter House

“...when your child dies, you feel everything you'd expect to feel, feelings so well-documented by so many others that I won't even bother to list them here, except to say that everything that's written about mourning is all the same, and it's all the same for a reason - because there is no read deviation from the text. Sometimes you feel more of one thing and less of another, and sometimes you feel them out of order, and sometimes you feel them for a longer time or a shorter time. But the sensations are always the same.

But here's what no one says - when it's your child, a part of you, a very tiny but nonetheless unignorable part of you, also feels relief. Because finally, the moment you have been expecting, been dreading, been preparing yourself for since the day you became a parent, has come.

Ah, you tell yourself, it's arrived. Here it is.

And after that, you have nothing to fear again.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“novels are untrustworthy advisers. They aren't concerned with rationality or sobriety; they peddle in tragedy and suspense, in chaos and rule breaking, in madness and heartache, and they will steer you toward such things with all the guile of a piper luring rats into a river.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January