Alienor

“I thought: I cannot bear this world a moment longer. Then, child, make another.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“And I think, if nothing else, I can deny Elizabeth the victory of the death of all her cousins...and I think I am damned if I am going to spare Elizabeth the problem of dealing with three surviving heirs. I am Jane Grey's sister - they are calling her the first Protestant Martyr - I am not going to slip away in silence; she did not. "Learn you to die!" does not mean lie down like Jo the pug, with your paw over your nose, and give up. "Learn you to die!" means consider how your death is meaningful, as your life is meaningful.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Last Tudor

“For her part, Patricia was looking at Laurence and feeling a kind of ache deeper than mere sexual desire, although there was that, too. All of her life, she felt like she had been telling people, “It doesn’t have to be like this,” which is the close cousin to “It can be better than this.” Or even, “We can be better than this.” As a little girl, getting pressed into the dirt by her schoolmates or padlocked in a foul old spice crate by Roberta, she’d tried to say that with tears in her eyes, but she didn’t have the words back then and nobody would have understood anyway. As the outcast freak in junior high, with everybody wanting to burn her alive, she’d given up on even trying to find a way to say, “It can be more than this.” But she’d never let go of that feeling, and it came back now, in the form of hope. She gazed at Laurence’s face (which looked squarer and more handsome without a big shirt collar framing it), his surprisingly puffy and suckable-looking nipples, his shaved pubes, and the way the leg and stomach hair erupted in a heart-shaped ring around the depilated zone. And she felt like they, the two of them, right here, right now, could make something that defied tragedy.”
― Charlie Jane Anders, All the Birds in the Sky

“Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe