Ruby

“All learned people learn Latin. It's bound to come in useful. Fairy tales, on the other hand, are about real life.”
― Monica Furlong, Wise Child

“If she was half an animal, let the animal half speak for her, then. The human part was tied up with human things like self-loathing, but that did not matter. There were no words in reindeer speech for I hate myself. It was not a concept that could be thought, and so she did not bother to think it. She”
― T. Kingfisher, The Raven and the Reindeer

“I said to him that 'second place' pretty much summed up how I felt about myself and my life–that it had been a near miss, requiring just as much effort as victory but with that victory always and forever somehow denied me, by a force that I could only describe as the force of pre-eminence. I could never win, and the reason I couldn't seemed to lie within certain infallible laws of destiny that I was powerless – as the woman I was – to overcome.”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe