Alice 🔮

“The ache in his lungs was unbearable. He needed to tell her … what? That she was lovely and brave and better than anything he deserved. That he was twisted, crooked, wrong, but not so broken that he couldn’t pull himself together into some semblance of a man for her. That without meaning to, he’d begun to lean on her, to look for her, to need her near. He needed to thank her for his new hat. The”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“The guard hit Kestrel across the face. “I said, what did you give him?”

You had a warrior’s heart, even then.

Kestrel spat blood. “Nothing,” she told the guard. She thought of her father, she thought of Arin. She told her final lie. “I gave him nothing.”
― Marie Rutkoski, The Winner's Crime

“She smiled then, her eyes red, her cheeks scattered with some kind of dust. It was a smile he thought he might die to earn again.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“In the east," she says after a time, her gaze still downcast, "there is a tradition known as kintsukuroi. It is the practice of mending broken ceramic pottery using lacquer dusted with gold and silver and other precious metals. It is meant to symbolize that things can be more beautiful for having been broken."
"Why are you telling me this?" I ask.
At last she looks at me. Her irises are polished obsidian in the moonlight. "Because I want you to know," she says, "that there is life after survival.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue