Jennifer

“Friendship is like a house,” Lore finally managed to say, Owen’s head cradled in her lap. “You move into this place together. You find your own room there, and they find theirs, but there’s all this common space, all these shared places. And you each put into it all the things you love, all the things you are. Your air becomes their air. You put your hearts on the coffee table, next to the remote control, vulnerable and beautiful and bloody. And this friendship, this house, it’s a place of laughter and fun and togetherness, too. But there’s frustration sometimes. Agitation. Sometimes that gets big, too big, all the awful feelings, all that resentment, building up like carbon monoxide. Friendship, like a house, can go bad, too. That air you share? Goes sour. Dry rot here, black mold there, and if you don’t remediate, it just grows and grows. Gets bad enough, one or all of you have to move out. And then the place just fucking sits there, abandoned. Empty and gutted. Another ruin left to that force in the world that wants everything to fall apart. You can move back into a place like that, sometimes. But only if you tear it all down and start again.”
― Chuck Wendig, The Staircase in the Woods

“When you hurt the way we women sometimes have to, when you lose so much, when the world ends over and over and over again, we are no longer butterflies. Those wings are much too fragile to carry us on and through. I’m a hornet. I can love. And I can sting.”
― Kennedy Ryan, This Could Be Us

“There are so many ways to break a woman’s heart. Her children. Her lover. Her body when it betrays her. Life is clever that way, devising plans for our demise from the moment we’re born. Death by a million heartbreaks, a thousand regrets, a hundred goodbyes.”
― Kennedy Ryan, This Could Be Us

“Words hurt as bad as a fist. Maybe worse. Because a fist, maybe you excuse that as oh, he couldn’t help it, he’s just an animal, a primate, his blood was up. But someone cuts you with words? Calls you names, tells you how little they think of you? That bypasses all your armor. A razor sliding across the meat of your heart.”
― Chuck Wendig, The Staircase in the Woods