Anzu Pai

“Holy tater tits, he was powerful.”
― K.F. Breene, Born in Fire

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life… You give them a piece of you. They don't ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like "maybe we should just be friends" or "how very perceptive" turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing should be able to do that. Especially not love. I hate love.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“Is it possible to fall in love over a single look? Anna couldn’t say. But at the behest of a glance tossed casually down upon her, she was made witness, victim, and slave to the culmination of all her mythologies. And every heretofore moment in her life, the ones that mattered and the ones that only seemed to matter, had added up to the sum of this intense instant, this instant alone.”
― Jill Alexander Essbaum, Hausfrau

“Let it be thus, Geralt of Rivia. Perhaps your destiny was precisely to renounce it and quit? I think that’s exactly what it was. For you should know that if you had chosen, chosen correctly, you would see that the destiny you mock has been sneering at you.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, Sword of Destiny