Rachel Piper

“Sometimes we become what we see. Sometimes we take what we see and make it the model for what we refuse to become.”
― Sharon Shinn, Summers at Castle Auburn

“He might have been encased in a thick glass bubble, so separate did he feel from his three dining companions. It was a sensation with which he was only too familiar, that of walking in a giant sphere of worry, enclosed by it, watching his own terrors roll by, obscuring the outside world.”
― J.K. Rowling, The Casual Vacancy

“It changes you,” Keely says. “You can be okay again. Just a different kind of okay than before.”
― Emery Lord, The Names They Gave Us

“But hidden drawers, lockable diaries and cryptographic systems could not conceal from Briony the simple truth: she had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious, organised world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing. Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel. Her effective status as an only child, as well as the relative isolation of the Tallis house, kept her, at least during the long summer holidays, from girlish intrigues with friends. Nothing in her life was sufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding; no one knew about the squirrel's skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement