Anne Secher

“She grows up feeling wrong, out of place, too dark, too tall, too unruly, too opinionated, too silent, too strange. She grows up with the awareness that she is merely tolerated, an irritant useless, that she does not deserve love, that she will need to change herself substantially, crush herself down if she is to be married. She grows up, too, with the memory of what it meant to be properly loved, for what you are, not what you ought to be.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet

“This kiss though, this is different. This is the teeth of the zipper finally falling into place, closing the jacket. This is the gears of the machine lining up to mass produce manufactured bottles. This is drowning but never dying.”
― Brittany Colleen Pratt, The B-Side

“Who are you?”
A long, slow silence, and then the voice laughed. Konstantin wasn’t sure he heard it; he might only have seen it, in the quiver of the shadows on the wall.
“The bringer of storms,” murmured the voice with a certain satisfaction. “For once you so summoned me. But long ago men called me the Bear—Medved.”
“You are a devil!” whispered Konstantin, clenching his hands. All the shadows laughed. “As you like. But what difference is there between me and the one you call God? I too revel in deeds done in my name. I can give you glory, if you will do my bidding.”
― Katherine Arden

“A mage's power either grows or weakens. Power never reamins still and neither does the strength of a nation. Only those who can find new sources of strength may earn a mage's name. Those who cannot, have no value to our people.”
― Sebastien de Castell, Spellslinger