Ruxandra

“It’s you I love,” he says. “I spent much of my life guarding my heart. I guarded it so well that I could behave as though I didn’t have one at all. Even now, it is a shabby, worm-eaten, and scabrous thing. But it is yours.” He walks to the door to the royal chambers, as though to end the conversation. “You probably guessed as much,” he says. “But just in case you didn’t.”
― Holly Black, The Queen of Nothing

“I can’t lose the thing I’ve held onto for so long, you know?” My face twists up from the pain of pushing it out. “I just really need it to be a love story, you know? I really, really need it to be that.”
“I know,” she says.
“Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it”? I look to her glassy eyes, her face of wide open empathy. “It’s my life,” I say. “This has been my whole life.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“Abuse can feel like love.”
“Abuse can feel like love…Why?”
Damon remained so still it didn’t look like he was breathing. He looked at the teacher, unwavering. “Starving people will eat anything.”
― Penelope Douglas, Nightfall

“He would come to share her joys until he could no longer separate them from his own, and then one day, maybe turning to her at a party or rushing to ask in a text message, he would say: What's that thing I like? And she would know the answer. She would know everything.
Eventually, all the answers to all that he was would be cradled in the palms of her hands.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether