Shay

“He did not crush gold cans of Presidente, like his father had. He did not collapse the drywall with our bodies. But I saw him weep in the yard.”
― Melissa Febos, Abandon Me: Memoirs

“We really want the undoing of our earliest wounds and sometimes, in our attempts to correct the errors of our childhoods, we choose the exact thing we hope to avoid. We recognize a chance for love's redemption and run toward it. We hope for a different ending.”
― Melissa Febos, Abandon Me: Memoirs

“Call it grace, call it survival, call it strength—whatever allowed me to seize that moment of clarity and insist that what I was searching for was not in any cloistered room. It is something that my brother and I were given by our parents and the ways that they loved us. It is a fundamental belief in the worth of one's own life. It is the knowledge of true love, and the belief that we are capable givers and receivers of it.”
― Melissa Febos, Abandon Me: Memoirs

“And this, even more wonderful and mysterious, is also true: when I read it, when I read what Julie's written, she is instantly alive again, whole and undamaged. With her words in my mind while I'm reading, she is as real as I am. Gloriously daft, drop-dead charming, full of bookish nonsense and foul language, brave and generous. She's right here. Afraid and exhausted, alone, but fighting. Flying in silver moonlight in a plane that can't be landed, stuck in the climb - alive, alive, ALIVE.”
― Elizabeth Wein, Code Name Verity