A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (Monk & Robot, #2)

by Becky Chambers

It was always a strange thing, coming home. Coming home meant that you had, at one point, left it and, in doing so, irreversibly changed. How odd, then, to be able to return to a place that would always be anchored in your notion of the past. How could this place still be there, if the you that once lived there no longer existed?

a place they knew intimately and no longer knew at all.

You don’t have to have a reason to be tired. You don’t have to earn rest or comfort. You’re allowed to just be. I say that wherever I go.” They threw a hand toward their wagon, its wooden sides emblazoned with the summer bear. “It’s painted on the side of my home! But I don’t feel like it’s true, for me. I feel like it’s true for everyone else but not me. I feel like I have to do more than that. Like I have a responsibility to do more than that.”

“How am I supposed to tell people they’re good enough as they are when I don’t think I am?”