Julia

“He moved my hand into his, and as our fingers intertwined, it occurred to me that love wasn’t all that I’d feared it to be. I had imagined that it was a wildfire that incinerated everything in its path. Instead, it felt as ordinary and extraordinary as waking up to a new day.”
― June Hur, The Red Palace

“He laughs despite knowing he has ruined every beautiful thing just to prove beauty cannot change him.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“I didn't want the bastards to see me bleed," she whispers to her mother.

"Sometimes, I'm afraid that they're going to have to. To understand that you're a real person," her mother sobs, clutching her daughter so very tightly in her arms.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“But the flag of what country, I cannot say. Some dark crescent of land, a place where suffering is essentially meaningless, where the present collapses into the past without warning, where we cannot escape the fates we fear the most, where heavy rains come and wash bodies up and out of their graves, where grief lasts forever and its force never fades.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Red Parts