Vivian

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“It was my mother who tucked him in and told him that there exists a sort of love in the world that only survives as long as no one ever speaks of it, and that was why he would never have to worry because my grandmother was never going to be the kind of mother who held her children in her arms and told them how smart and beautiful and talented they were. She was only going to scold them, make them feel diminutive, make them feel like they were never good enough, make them know this world wouldn't be kind to them. She wasn't going to let someone else be better than her at making her children feel pain or scare them more than she could, and that to her, that was a form of protection. That's how we will be with our own children, my mother was proud to realize. Because we'll learn from our mother who learned from her mother before her and all the mothers before them.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life