Rachel

“He was terribly afraid that happiness might be a habit, or a quality knitted into the temperament, or it might be something you learn when you're a child, a kind of language harder than Latin or Greek, that you should have a grasp on by the time you're seven. What if you haven't got that grasp? What if you're in some way happiness-stupid, happiness-blind?”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“That’s what comes of hungering for something; you forget to check if it’s rotten before you gobble it down”
― Holly Black, The Cruel Prince

“The combined smell of coffee and used books felt like the intersection of all things good and necessary.”
― Katrina Leno, Horrid

“She…hoped. And hope was dangerous. Hope was the most vicious evil of them all, the thing that had managed to thrive in Pandora’s box among misery, and disease, and sadness—and what could endure alongside others with such teeth if it didn’t have ghastly claws of its own?”
― Chloe Gong, These Violent Delights