Bonnie

“She was happy—or rather, she wasn’t unhappy. And wasn’t that enough?”
― GennaRose Nethercott, Thistlefoot

“But you left; you had to. Because you knew, if they didn’t, that Jeff Kerwin, Junior, wasn’t the boy they loved. Probably, if it came to that, the first Jeff Kerwin, your father, hadn’t been that boy either, and that was why he had left. They loved something they had made up for themselves and called their son, and perhaps, you thought, they’d even be happier with memories and no real boy around to destroy that image of their perfect son.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Bloody Sun

“I say the gods deal very unrightly with us. For they will neither (which would be best of all) go away and leave us to live our own short days to ourselves, nor will they show themselves openly and tell us what they would have us do. For that too would be endurable. But to hint and hover, to draw us in dreams and oracles, or in a waking vision that vanishes as soon as seen, to be dead silent when we question them and then glide back and whisper (words we cannot understand) in our ears when we most wish to be free of them, and to show to one what they hide from another; what is all this but cat-and-mouse play, blindman's bluff, and mere jugglery? Why must holy places be dark places?”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“You bought the girls drinks and you stared at their perfect bodies and you pretended that they liked you. And they pretended that they liked you, too. When you stopped spending money, they got up and pretended that they liked someone else.”
― George Alec Effinger, WHEN GRAVITY FAILS Easton Press