Goth Gone Grey

“It turns out that no one believes her anyway, and that lack of belief in her festers, infects her through and through—because, in her heart, she wants to be an honest person, and she thought she was. But she is not fully honest with anyone, not even with herself. It turns out she cannot give voice to uncertainty; this is not allowed. She does not need to be told this to know it is true. So she becomes quiet; she continues her journey inward, a journey she will be on for years, alone, unable to share with anyone, not her family, not her friends, not her lover.”
― Katrin Schumann, The Forgotten Hours

“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

“My brain got broken a long time ago, and as a result, a car driving along the street is never just a car driving along the street; it’s a death machine with eroded brake lines, and the driver is sneezing and doesn’t see that he’s careening toward me. So many years of anticipating disaster is exhausting. Though I have tried to train myself not to think this way, it never works, so plan B is to go ahead and think this way but then remind myself I’m wrong. Which means I can only cobble together a life by clobbering my faulty “gut instincts” 100 percent of the time.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Lust & Wonder

“She had aged with style and beauty. In soft romantic lighting, I could still see the magnificent girl from Mexico who had saved me with her love. When the lighting was less sentimental and somewhat more revealing, she was perhaps even more magnificent. The years had added a velvety richness to her physical beauty, a resonance to her inner loveliness that made her even more spectacular. She was a woman in every sense of the word, yet so much of the young girl remained in those dark and lovely eyes it made you feel young again too.”
― Bobby Underwood, Just Beyond Love