Caroline

“It didn’t matter that the story had begun, because kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“I’ll manage,” Kim said. “All I need to know is that you’re with me today and will be here tomorrow. If I can have today and tomorrow on a rolling basis—” “Yes.”
― K.J. Charles, Subtle Blood

“When people are obliged to keep an eye out for threats, their eyes tend to be sharp. That’s what women’s intuition means, if you ask me: being unconsciously alert for dangerous men.”
― K.J. Charles, The Sugared Game

“I was holding myself together by my fingernails for a very long time, until the most magnificently stubborn sod of a bookseller came into my life. You treated me, against all the evidence, as if I were something resembling the man I ought to be, with such pertinacious obstinacy I have all but started to believe it myself. I spent the last few months thinking about this as I reordered your outrageous mess of a bookshop. How I came to be where I was, what I’d done to bring it on myself. What I need to do differently.”
― K.J. Charles, Subtle Blood