Isma Shaheen

“He never understood that I wasn’t scared of someone leaving me. I was scared that the wrong person would stay.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“People who say “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” don’t understand how words can be stones, hard and sharp-edged and dangerous and capable of doing so much more harm than anything physical.”
― Seanan McGuire, Middlegame

“The way I see it, you mostly stop loving a person the same way you stop respecting them. It can happen all at once if something enormous and terrible falls over the two of you. But for the most part, it happens in inches. In a thousand tiny moments of contempt that unravel the image you had of the person you thought you knew.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“Rather than asking him to repeat himself, I waited. It was a trick I learned from my father, letting the silence thicken until it was suffocating.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife