Melanie Pieper

“I get the feeling I do on finishing a novel with a brick-wall happy ending - I mean the kind of ending when you never think any more about the characters.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“When people felt pain time and time again, they came to fear that pain above all other things. So they tried to ignore it, to forget it was happening, as a way of bearing it. And pretty soon, they would come to feel like they'd accomplished something just by doing that -- even though nothing had changed.”
― Fuyumi Ono, The Twelve Kingdoms: Skies of Dawn

“There are some things in this world you can never get back... There's no reclaiming that piece of the past. Don't you think it'd be better to abandon it completely and consider instead what you did wrong and learn from it?”
― Fuyumi Ono, The Twelve Kingdoms: Skies of Dawn

“Happiness isn't a thing. You can't go out and get it like a cup of tea. It's the way you feel about things.”
― Diana Wynne Jones, Fire and Hemlock