Natalie Monroe

“One of the great tragedies of life is knowing how many people in the world are made to soar, paint, sing, or steer—except they never get the chance to find out.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Tress of the Emerald Sea

“Memory is often our only connection to who we used to be. Memories are fossils, the bones left by dead versions of ourselves. More potently, our minds are a hungry audience, craving only the peaks and valleys of experience. The bland erodes, leaving behind the distinctive bits to be remembered again and again. Painful or passionate, surreal or sublime, we cherish those little rocks of peak experience, polishing them with the ever-smoothing touch of recycled proxy living. In so doing—like pagans praying to a sculpted mud figure—we make of our memories the gods which judge our current lives.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Tress of the Emerald Sea

“Love was the destroyer. It made mourners, widows, left misery in its wake. Grief and love were one and the same. Grief was the shadow love left when it was gone.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Rule of Wolves

“We always pretend the ideals and culture of the past have aged like wine, but in truth, the ideas of the past tend to age more like biscuits. They simply get stale.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Tress of the Emerald Sea