Katie Kenig

“Recently I've been having the fantasy more and more" the one where Tack and I run away, disappear under the wide-open sky into the forest with leaves like green hands, welcoming us. In my fantasy, the more we walk, the cleaner we get, like the woods are rubbing away the past few years, all the blood and the fighting and the scars - sloughing off the bad memories and the false starts, leaving us shiny and new, like dolls just taken out of the package.

And in this fantasy, my fantasy life, we find a stone cottage hidden deep in the forest, untouched, fitted with beds and rugs and plates and everything we need to live - like the owners just picked up and walked away, or like the house had been built for us and was just waiting all this time.

We fish the stream and hunt the woods in the summer. We grow potatoes and peppers and tomatoes big as pumpkins. In the winter we stay inside by the fire while snow falls around us like a blanket, stilling the world, cocooning it in sleep.”
― Lauren Oliver, Raven

“It was time for some serious thinking, and Jasper didn’t reckon he should do that on an empty lung. Empty head was one thing; lungs needed smoke to survive – so his ol’ Pap’d said.”
― David Niall Wilson, The DeChance Chronicles Omnibus: Books I - IV

“While other girls were blurry, displaying cracks or, at the very least, seams
—
ripped jeans, coffee-stained T-shirts, hair that poufed up in the rain
—
Sophia always looked sharp, clear, as if the resolution had been turned up on a microscope and angled straight at her, as if the money had formed a kind of shrink wrap that kept her protected from the normal destruction of the everyday.”
― Lauren Oliver, Panic Origin Story

“He didn't need someone to fix the problem - there was no fixing it. He needed someone to acknowledge his feelings. Accept his pain. Agree that his heart was broken, and that it should be. And that it might stay broken for a long, long time.”
― Julie Lawson Timmer, Five Days Left