Lena

“He listens as I tell him how it's like something else moved into our house this year. Something different to annoyance or irritation, which has always lived side by side with us. It's bigger, with a huge shadow, one that makes everything cold. You can't brush it away, or forget that it's there. It's over the whole house. There are only slips of warmth in a few tiny places and not where you used to find them.”
― Tara Eglington, The Long Distance Playlist

“She chooses to fight for you in her own way,” a voice said in her ear. “Would you ask strangers to fight for you, but deny your friends?”
“I don’t want her to get hurt. I don’t want any of them to get hurt!”
“Would you bear her hurts if you could?”
“Yes, of course!”
A soft, maternal chuckle. “Then grant her the same thing. You cannot stop others from loving you, you know, or from being noble about it.”
― T. Kingfisher, Snake-Eater

“Like my doppelganger projecting all of our surveillance fears on a vaccine app, conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right—the feeling of living in a world with Shadow Lands, the feeling that every human misery is someone else’s profit, the feeling of being exhausted by predation and extraction, the feeling that important truths are being hidden. The word for the system driving those feelings starts with c, but if no one ever taught you how capitalism works, and instead told you it was all about freedom and sunshine and Big Macs and playing by the rules to get the life you deserve, then it’s easy to see how you might confuse it with another c-word: conspiracy.”
― Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World

“There’s no winning. The trauma is either your fault or it’s a gift. It’s either You should have done this to stop it or Look what good has come of it! If you don’t get over it, why can’t you get over it? Why can’t you get past it or learn how to cope? Or if you do find some way to move on with your life in a socially acceptable manner, then you’re so brave and so strong, and aren’t you amazing? Let’s applaud you for moving forward while there’s a knife at your back.”
― Rachel Harrison, Such Sharp Teeth