Isabella

“Your eyes
I saw differently when I looked with your eyes. I walked differently when I walked with your body. I wanted to show you clean things. Before brutality, sadness, despair, filth, pain, clean things that were only for you, clean things above all. But it didn’t come off as I intended. Again and again I peered into your eyes, as though searching for form in a deep, black mirror.
If only we’d been living in a city back then, I heard my mother say several times during my childhood.
If only an ambulance could have taken me to hospital.
If only they’d put her in an incubator, that tiny rice cake of a baby. They were a new thing then, incubators.
If only you hadn’t stopped breathing. And had therefore been granted all this life in my stead, I who would then never have been born. If it had been granted to you to go firmly forwards, with your own eyes and your own body, your back to the dark mirror.”
― Han Kang, The White Book

“From now until darkness claims us.”
― Sarah J. Maas, Heir of Fire

“This witch had been crafted from the darkness between the stars.

“I think not, Prince,” she said in her midnight voice. She sniffed again, her nose crinkling slightly. “But would you bleed red, or black?”

“I’ll bleed whatever color you tell me to.”
― Sarah J. Maas, Queen of Shadows

“Now and then, the passage of time seems acutely apparent. Physical pain always sharpens the awareness.”
― Han Kang, 흰