Elena

“There are two kinds of guilt. The kind that's a burden and the kind that gives you purpose. Let your guilt be your fuel. Let it remind you of who you want to be. Draw a line in your mind. Never cross it again. You have a soul. It's damaged but it's there. Don't let them take it from you.”
― Sabaa Tahir, An Ember in the Ashes

“Besides,'' she said, "it was not a hero I was thinking of. If anybody, it was Catherine Vernon." "Whom you don't like. These women, who step out of their sphere, they may do much to be respected, they may be of great use; but " "You mean that men don't like them," said Hester, with a smile; " but then women do; and, after all, we are the half of creation — or more.”
― Mrs. Oliphant, Hester

“And Jane all her life would be interested in ordinary, unexceptional girls and what might happen to them. Her quietest heroine of all, Fanny Price, had ‘no glow of complexion, nor any other striking beauty’, while Catherine Morland had ‘nothing heroic’ about her, and was ‘occasionally stupid’. Jane’s great achievement would be to let even the ordinary, flawed, human girls who read her books think that they might be heroines too.”
― Lucy Worsley, Jane Austen at Home: A Biography

“They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People