Angela

“Her price fluctuated. When you are sold that many times, the world is teaching you to pay attention. She learned to quickly adjust to the new plantations, sorting the nigger breakers from the merely cruel, the layabouts from the hardworking, the informers from the secret-keepers.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“We don’t deserve anything—not the suffering and not the golden light. It just comes.”
― Ann Patchett, These Precious Days: Essays

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“People are not characters, no matter how often we tell them they are; conversations are not dialogue; and the actions of our days don't add up to a plot. In life, time runs along in its sameness, but in fiction time is condensed-one action springboards into another, greater action. and effect are so much clearer in novels than in life. You might not see how everything threads together as you read along, but when you look back from the end of the story, the becomes map clear.”
― Ann Patchett, These Precious Days: Essays