Goth Gone Grey

“But she had not been tempted to look him up back then. She’d become accustomed to the sense of herself as separate from all others, and there was something comforting about that. It was best to keep the past just out of reach, hovering a little more than arm’s length away. While she knew it was there, could sense it, she carefully kept those memories out of her grasp, and she sometimes seemed to forget the past entirely. But that was an illusion. Her memories of Jack, of Lulu—of life before—were not actually gone and forgotten; they lived on inside her, shadows of a bleached-out stain.”
― Katrin Schumann, The Forgotten Hours

“If there is anything for absolute certainty that I can say then it is that your physical appearance, current life situation, belonging, finances, friends and family do not define you as an individual. What defines you is something that is physically impossible to touch yet so easily disturbed and distorted through words and actions, media and negativity. What defines you as an individual and makes you who you are and so unique, special, and a value in society, is your mind-set and personality. It’s so cliché yet so underrated, but it truly is what’s inside of you that matters, and the best thing that you can do for yourself in life is to live life the way you, and only you, want to, and to do what you want to do, say what you want to say, dress the way you want to dress, and love who you want to love. The best thing you can do is truly, honestly love yourself.”
― Regina Phalange, Slipping through my fingers: The story of a dying girl

“They fitted – it just felt right. Not your Hollywood right, better, she was a real woman, she had problems like him, insecurities, and a past – scars both physical and psychological. It made her three-dimensional, deeper than some Hollywood eye candy. What he was trying to say in his masculine and inefficient way was that he loved her.”
― Lachlan Standfield, Finding Melancholy: Psychological crime and suspense thriller: One choice. Two paths. A brutal binary proposition.

“What I didn’t know then was that when you try to hold on to the past as hard as I was, you sometimes miss out on living in the present. I wish that someone had told me, Christina, live in the moment and dream of the future. That doesn’t mean you lose yourself. But stopping where you are now will cost you more than you can imagine.”
― Christina Rickardsson, Never Stop Walking: A Memoir of Finding Home Across the World