Ketaki

“I thought, this is the most incredible thing I have ever seen, and I had better keep it a safe distance away from me. I thought, if someone like that ever loved me, it would set me on fire.
And then I was a careless fool, and I fell in love with you anyway. When you rang me at truly shocking hours of the night, I loved you. When you kissed me in disgusting public toilets and pouted in hotel bars and made me happy in ways in which it had never even occurred to me that a mangled-up, locked-up person like me could be happy, I loved you.
And then, inexplicably, you had the absolute audacity to love me back. Can you believe it?
Sometimes, even now, I still can't.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“He'd been ready to fall to his knees and beg and say, I don't want to die. I'm not ready. I'm not ready to leave. I don't know what's out there beyond me. I don't think it's heaven. I don't think it's bright. I think it's dark and cold and an endless tunnel of nothing. Like your hole in the planet, Jim. And I don't want to be alone in nothing, years of nothing, centuries of cold, cold nothing and only my lonely heart floating through it, alone and alone and alone.”
― Dennis Lehane, Mystic River

“What did I care if numbers of nameless and faceless people and creatures were slaughtered in the vague future, if in the here and now you were alive, and well, and happy? I never dreamed that I would have such a person on my hands.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

“It seemed impossible that there could be people in the world who still desired food, who laughed, who neither knew nor cared that Sirius Black was gone forever.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix