Erica

“You’re wrong about my father,” she said. “I know he’s difficult—but he loves me. And I love him.” “No,” said Ruth firmly. “At best, let’s call it a desire to be loved. At worst, it’s a pathological attachment to a narcissistic man: a melting pot of gratitude, fear, expectation, and dutiful obedience that has nothing to do with love in the true sense of the word. You don’t love him. Nor do you know or love yourself.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Maidens

“Meeting you was a disaster.”
She raised a brow. “Thank you.”
Djel, he was terrible at this. He stumbled on, trying to make her understand. “But I am grateful for that disaster. I needed a catastrophe to shake me from the life I knew. You were an earthquake, a landslide.”
“I,” she said, planting a hand on her hip, “am a delicate flower.”
“You aren’t a flower, you’re every blossom in the wood blooming at once. You are a tidal wave. You’re a stampede. You are overwhelming.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“Ruth always said that forgiveness could not be coerced – it was experienced spontaneously, as an act of grace, appearing only when a person was ready.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Maidens

“Even in his final moments, I doubt he learned his lesson. But I didn’t kill him to teach him a lesson; I killed him to carve him out of this world like a tumor. And I’d do it again.”
― Layne Fargo, They Never Learn