Stefanie

“Do you know what it means to be emphatic? I will tell you: It means that when you are being forcibly taken to a dungeon, when you have a large knife at your back, when you are trying to be brave, you are able, still, to think for a moment of the person who is holding the knife.”
― Kate DiCamillo, The Tale of Despereaux

“I thought that it was more likely the opposite. I must have shut grief out. Found it in books. Cried over fiction instead of the truth. The truth was unconfined, unadorned. There was no poetic language to it, no yellow butterflies, no epic floods. There wasn't a town trapped underwater or generations of men with the same name destined to make the same mistakes. The truth was vast enough to drown in.”
― Nina LaCour, We Are Okay

“Quiet people often have a weather sense that loud people lack. They feel the wind-changes of conversations, and shiver in the chill of unspoken resentments.”
― Frances Hardinge, The Lie Tree

“Sometimes pain is so unmanageable that the idea of spending another day with it seems impossible. Other times pain acts as a compass to help you get through the messier tunnels of growing up. But the pain can only help you find happiness if you can remember it.”
― Adam Silvera, More Happy Than Not