Sarah

“Nobody else is ever going to care as much as you do about the things that you want, Gwendoline. So it's up to you - you can put them aside forever, if you can live with that, or you can put on your big-girl girdle and demand more for yourself.”
― Lex Croucher, Gwen & Art Are Not in Love

“The thing is,' Gwen said, muffled again against her dress, 'I think I could love a man. I just...haven't. I don't notice many people in that way. And if I could love a man, then surely I should try. It would make everything so much easier.'
'You could,' said Arthur. 'You could fall in love with a man, and know that you once liked Bridget, and neither of those things would change the other. They would both be true. But right now you do like Bridget. So I don't think you should settle for a life that denies that particular truth.”
― Lex Croucher, Gwen & Art Are Not in Love

“Have I ever told you how much you sound like Madoc when you talk about murder?” Cardan said, opening one eye. “Because you do.”

Oak expected his sister to be angry, but she only laughed. “That must be what you like about me.”

“That you’re terrifying?” he asked, his drawl becoming exaggeratedly languorous, almost a purr. “I adore it.”

She leaned against him, resting her head on his shoulder, and closed her eyes. The king’s arms came around her, and she shivered once, as though letting something fall away.”
― Holly Black, The Prisoner’s Throne

“In ballads, love is a disease, an affliction. You contract it as a mortal might contract one of their viruses. Perhaps a touch of hands or a brush of lips, and then it is as though your whole body is fevered and fighting it. But there’s no way to prevent it from running its course.”
“That’s a remarkably poetic and profoundly awful view of love,” Oak says.
Tiernan looks back at the sea. “I was never in love before, so all I had were ballads to go by.”
Oak is silent, thinking of all the times he thought himself to be in love. “Never?”
Tiernan gives a soft huff of breath. “I had lovers, but that’s not the same thing.”
Oak thinks about how to name what he feels about Wren. He does not wish to write her ridiculous poems as he did for so many of the people with whom he thought he was in love, except that he does wish to make her laugh. He does not want to give her enormous speeches or to make grand, empty gestures; he does not want to give her the pantomime of love. He is starting to suspect, however, that pantomime is all he knows.
“But…” Tiernan says, and hesitates again, running hand through his short blackberry hair. “What I feel is not like the ballads.”
“Not an affliction, then?” Oak raises an eyebrow. “No fever?”
Tiernan gives him an exasperated look—one with which the prince is very familiar. “It is more the feeling that there is a part of me I have left somewhere and am always looking for.”
“So he’s like a missing phone?”
“Someone ought to pitch you into the sea,” Tiernan says, but he has a small smile in the corner of his mouth.”
― Holly Black, The Prisoner’s Throne