Alyssa

“We are all measured, good or evil, by the wrong we do to others; I had made a monster and turned it loose upon the world and--since recognition is, after all, the cruelest pain--had seen it clearly and with understanding.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Bird's Nest

“I was thinking what it must feel like to be a prisoner going to die; you stand there looking at the sun and the sky and the grass and the trees, and because it's the last time you're going to see them they're wonderful, full of colors you never noticed before, and bright and beautiful and terribly hard to leave behind. And then, suppose you're reprieved, and you get up the next morning and you're not dead; could you look again at the sun and the trees and the sky and think they're the same old sun and sky and trees, nothing special at all, just the same told things you've seen every day? Not changed at all, just because you don't have to give them up?”
― Shirley Jackson, The Bird's Nest

“To say that is to say we have no choice at all in what we do, how we live. I don't believe that, Uncle. Perhaps we do have a short span in this world [...]; perhaps our scope is somewhat limited. But within those limits we do have the power to change things, the power to make choices and to go where we must.”
― Juliet Marillier, Son of the Shadows

“There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.”
― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing