Elyssia

“There are no bargains between lion and men. I will kill you and eat you raw.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“And we held each other in the dark hall and laughed, with the tears running down our cheeks and echoes of our laughter going up the ruined stairway to the sky.
'I am so happy,' Constance said at last, gasping. 'Merricat, I am so happy.'
'I told you that you would like it on the moon.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“I'm pore, I'm black, I may be ugly and can't cook, a voice say to everything listening. But I'm here.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.”
― John Williams, Stoner