Amanda

“Be bad, but at least don't be a liar, a deceiver!”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“Why is there ever this perverse cruelty in humankind, that makes us hurt most those we love best?”
― Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Chosen