Joanna

“The structures they built would bend and break, and they would make new ones. There would be nothing so precious that they couldn't begin again. And again.”
― Lily Brooks-Dalton, The Light Pirate

“This is survival. This is how the vessel protects the mind, how the mind protects the heart, how the heart goes on forgetting that its calling is to be undefended, tha being broken is part of being whole.”
― Lily Brooks-Dalton, The Light Pirate

“Nobody tells you how those nights that stand out in your memory—levee sunset nights, hurricane nights, first kiss nights, homesick sleepover nights, nights when you stood at your bedroom window and looked at the lilies one porch over and thought they would stand out, singular and crystallized, in your memory forever—they aren't really anything. They're everything, and they're nothing. They make you who you are, and they happen at the same time a twenty-three-year-old a million miles away is warming up some leftovers, turning in early, switching off the lamp. They're so easy to lose.”
― Casey McQuiston, One Last Stop

“You can try, she guesses. You can tear yourself apart and rebuild from stratch, bring yourself to every corner of the map, sew a new self from the scraps of a thousand other people and places. You can try to escape to fill a different shape. But at the end of the day, there's a place at the foot of the bed where your shoes hit the floor, and it's the same. It's always the same.”
― Casey McQuiston, One Last Stop