Sophie

“He's tried to explain this a couple of times to a few of his buddies after about five beers. Like listen, listen. Imagine you live in this country, right? And there's a brutal war, and you witness and maybe participate in a horrific amount of violence, and you lose absolutely everyone you care about. Then you end up in this other country, where the culture and ways of doing things are completely foreign to you, and random assholes make fun of you for how you dress and act and talk while you're still coming to grips with the fact that everyone you love is gone and you can never go home again. Meanwhile, everyone around you is like "smile, motherfucker, you're in the Land of Plenty now, where there's a Starbucks on every corner and 500 channels on TV. You should be grateful! Why aren't you acting more grateful?" So you have to pretend to be grateful while you're dying inside. Sound like an traumatized, orphaned refugee? Also sounds like Steve fucking Rogers, Captain Goddamn America. Except that most refugees were part of a community of other people who were going through the same thing. Steve is all alone, the last damn unicorn, if the last unicorn had horrible screaming nightmares about the time when it helped to liberate Buchenwald.”
― spitandvinegar, Ain't No Grave (Can Keep My Body Down)

“Cities allow us to extract some of the transactional services that were assumed to be an integral, gendered aspect of traditional marriage and enjoy them as actual transactional service, for which we pay. This dynamic also permits women to function in the world in a way that was once impossible, with the city serving as spouse and, sometimes, true love.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“Scars aren’t evidence of failure,” she said softly. “They are proof of survival.”
― Erica Ridley, Never Say Duke

“He wanted to memorize every inch of her, every curve and angle, the strong length of her thigh and the delicate bones of her wrist, storing up memories against a bleak and empty tomorrow. But that wasn’t how love worked. Love wasn’t a sum safely invested in the five percents. One couldn’t prevent future sorrow by capitalizing on present bliss. All he could do was have this moment, wring all the joy out of it, and then somehow continue after it was over.”
― Cat Sebastian, Unmasked by the Marquess