Pudge

“How can she expect her children to dream as big as the stars if they can't lift their heads to gaze upon them?”
― Josh Malerman, Bird Box

“It doesn’t matter,” she explains to Miss J. “I want to be where you are. And I don’t know the way back to wherever I was before, anyway. I don’t even remember it. All I remember is the block, and you. You’re…” Now it’s Melanie’s turn to hesitate. She doesn’t know the words for this. “You’re my bread,” she says at last. “When I’m hungry. I don’t mean that I want to eat you, Miss Justineau! I really don’t! I’d rather die than do that. I just mean… you fill me up the way the bread does to the man in the song. You make me feel like I don’t need anything else.”
― M.R. Carey, The Girl with All the Gifts

“They tried to kill me, Hellie,” she rasped as she slid into the dark. That means I get to try to kill them.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House

“Past the door, there was a long flight of concrete steps going up and up. She wasn’t supposed to see any of that stuff, and Sergeant said, “Little bitch has got way too many eyes on her” as he shoved her chair into her cell and slammed the door shut. But she saw, and she remembers.”
― M.R. Carey, The Girl With All the Gifts