Marya

“You don’t understand, Dad,” she blathers into the phone, but the truth is, she doesn’t understand, either. She doesn’t know why it’s so hard for her to let in that hurt. “I…I don’t know how to love halfway,” she reasons aloud. “I don’t know how to care just a little bit. If I let myself care at all, I’m going to care with every ounce of my being. And if I do that, and I lose them, it will hurt like hell.”
She’s not sure if she’s talking about Joe or Rosemary or both of them. The sun is blinding and she can’t see a thing.
“And…and I don’t know how to hurt halfway, either,” she continues. “I don’t know how to feel anything in moderation.”
There is silence on the other end this time. “Ah, but Chicken,” her dad says immediately. “Your big feelings are one of the most beautiful things about you.”
― Alison Cochrun, Here We Go Again

“I said it to the Flower, I'll say it again: There's a solace to be found in sadness. And I understand why ye’d think ye deserve that dark. Easier to find refuge in drink, in rage, to say hell with it all and push everyone away. Because ye think that cold is easier to live with than the pain that could come if ye let the warmth back in, only to be burned again.
But that's the fire that lets us know we're alive, Gabriel."
‘I shook my head, two pale shadows now rising at my back.
“‘You can't fix a broken blade, Phoebe."
“‘But don't ye see? We don't get broken. We’re made broken. We are not whole alone. But if we're blessed, if we're brave, we might find those few whose edges fit against our own. Like pieces of the same puzzle, or shards of the same shattered blade. Those people who, in their own broken way, make our broken edge complete.”
― Jay Kristoff, Empire of the Damned

“It’s a strange thing, to be a sibling. So much rancor and love. Hate and history. It’s a bond forged in iron, that tie. It takes a great deal of work to sunder it entirely. But it can be done.”
― Jay Kristoff, Empire of the Damned

“This is love. Love is seeing perfection in every flaw. Seeing every flaw as a miracle because it belongs to the person you care about the most. Love is saying, yes, still. Even after all these years”
― Alison Cochrun, Here We Go Again