Chloe Liese

“It’s smart to want to be safe. It’s a natural instinct. If we protect ourselves—our bodies, our minds, our hearts—we can avoid all these messy things. Being embarrassed. Making mistakes. Looking dumb. Getting our hearts broken. But there’s a huge price to pay for that safety. And usually that price is being alone or being stuck. Whether that’s stuck in a job or a relationship or in a place you don’t want to be. Everything has a price.”
― Roni Loren, Off the Clock

“I still sometimes have panic attacks, mostly before I publish a novel, or before I fall in love, or before I make any big life decision, because in my mind I’m still that third grader who feels as if I’m being judged. What if I screw up? What if I’m not worthy of love, or success, or living my dreams? But then I breathe and remind myself that it’s okay to be me. It’s okay to be scared some days, and fearless the next. It’s okay to be afraid of having a voice, and still using it each day. It’s okay to be a little cracked, and yet, still whole.”
― Brittainy C. Cherry, The Silent Waters

“Was this what it was to love someone? To have that wall of detachment crumble and be rebuilt into a bridge? I thought so. I swore it to myself because after those hours, we were so real together no one had to ask what was going on. Caden and I were an incurable condition. Dispassion had a place in our lives, but not with each other.”
― C.D. Reiss, Rough Edge

“In a word, literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. The things I have learned and the things I have been taught seem of ridiculously little importance compared with their "large loves and heavenly charities.”
― Helen Keller, The Story of My Life