Nicole

“I nodded. “I’m sorry I let you down.”

“No, no, dear,” she said, turning forward. “I see potential in you. I worked in a factory when I was your age. I was dirty and hungry, and sometimes I was angry. But I had an undying crush on the prince of Illéa, and when I got the chance to make him my own, I learned to check those feelings. There’s a lot to be done from here, but it might not happen the way you want it to. You need to learn to accept that, okay?”

“Yes, Mom,” I joked.

She looked back at me, her face like stone.

“I mean, ma’am. Ma’am.”

Her eyes started glistening, and she blinked a few times, turning forward again. “If it ends as I suspect it will, Mom will be just fine.”
― Kiera Cass, The One

“When you look death in the eye and death blinks first, nothing seems impossible.”
― Rick Yancey, The Infinite Sea

“Leave it to you to find beauty in something others would say ruins a day.”
― Kiera Cass, The One

“It never occurred to him that now he was looking at his master, at the one person in all the world who held his fate right between her palms - me, in patched hand-me-downs and untrimmed hair and idiot smile - and that my hatred for him is pure and black and unforgiving. And that I don't believe in God, but if I did, if I did, it would be the God of Moses, angry and demanding and OUT FOR REVENGE...”
― Elizabeth Wein, Code Name Verity