Melanie Daves

“but, really, unconditional love has a huge flaw. If you love me no matter what, who I actually am doesn’t matter. If someone loves your essence, your very being, what can you do to make them love you more or love you less? Nothing: there is no space. So the only option left to you is to continually prod at that unconditional love, to test it and stretch it, to mock it even.”
― Richard Osman, The Impossible Fortune

“I would never again be the Ariadne who had not been to Opera, just as I would never again be the Ariadne who had never left Earth, just as I would never again be the Ariadne who had never left her parents' home, who had never bled, who had yet to learn to walk. A moth was a caterpillar, once, but it no longer is a caterpillar. It cannot break itself back down, cannot metamorphose in reverse. To try to eat leaves again would mean starvation. Crawling back into the husk would provide no shelter. It is a paradox – the impossibility of reclaiming that which lies behind, housed within a form comprised entirely of the repurposed pieces of that same past. We exist where we begin, yet to remain there is death.”
― Becky Chambers, To Be Taught, If Fortunate

“Always alone, and never alone: that was grief.”
― Richard Osman, The Impossible Fortune

“Stories contain our existence; they are like gods. And the fact that we create them from living, experiencing, listening, thinking, feeling, giving--they remind me of what's great about being alive.”
― Nnedi Okorafor, Death of the Author