Immy

“Because once you have known Mrs Death there is no unknowing her. You have a mourning that sits inside you. It’s like having a stone in your centre; time smooths the edges like a pebble in a river, but it’s always there – a stone is a stone. If you’ve known loss, you’ll know this stone, you will carry a stone of your own – this pain and weight – and you’ll know what I mean. It is a tattoo under the inside of you that cannot fade or be removed. There is no unknowing the memory that a certain date and time triggers: the smell of the season, the time, the weather . . . We replay it, the jolt, the shock, the finality of death.”
― Salena Godden, Mrs Death Misses Death: Salena Godden

“Sex and food and drink and books. You really don’t need much else. Maybe a nice view of the sky. Some shoes that don’t hurt. A bed and roof that won’t leak. Some singing, some music and tempo. A heart full and a soul fed, a head full of dreams and possibilities, what more could you possibly want? What more is there?”
― Salena Godden, Mrs Death Misses Death: Salena Godden

“Under everything is happiness so deep and rich it’s like dark wet earth. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know why it’s there. But I could reach out and grab a fistful of it.”
― Bridget Collins, The Binding

“The day is impossibly bright: the sort of crystalline clarity that comes when winter still sits in the air. They have already entered at the narrow mouth of the fjord, and the cliffs rise sheerly either side, a clean hundred feet, the black rock raked with lines of lighter grey. The sea is green and glitters with chips of ice, and as soon as the wind bites at her face and brings up its blood, chilling her lungs, she feels better than she has since she left home.
‘They are magnificent, are they not?’
‘They are,’ she breathes, and is embarrassed by the keenness in her voice. ‘Though you must have seen mightier, captain?’
‘I take each sight for itself alone, Mistress Cornet.”
― Kiran Millwood Hargrave, The Mercies