Catherine

“He always liked learning. Loved it, really. If he could have spent his whole life sitting in a lecture hall, taking notes, could have drifted from department to department, haunting different studies, soaking up language and history and art, maybe he would have felt full, happy.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Time moves so fucking fast.

Blink, and you’re halfway through school, paralyzed by the idea that whatever you choose to do, it means choosing not to do a hundred other things, so you change your major half a dozen times before finally ending up in theology, and for a while it seems like the right path, but that’s really just a reflex to the pride on your parents’ faces, because they assume they’ve got a budding rabbi, but the truth is, you have no desire to practice, you see the holy texts as stories, sweeping epics, and the more you study, the less you believe in any of it.

Blink, and you’re twenty-four, and you travel through Europe, thinking—hoping—that the change will spark something in you, that a glimpse of the greater, grander world will bring your own into focus. And for a little while, it does. But there’s no job, no future, only an interlude, and when it’s over, your bank account is dry, and you’re not any closer to anything.

Blink, and you’re twenty-six, and you’re called into the dean’s office because he can tell that your heart’s not in it anymore, and he advises you to find another path, and he assures you that you’ll find your calling, but that’s the whole problem, you’ve never felt called to any one thing. There is no violent push in one direction, but a softer nudge a hundred different ways, and now all of them feel out of reach.

Blink and you’re twenty-eight, and everyone else is now a mile down the road, and you’re still trying to find it, and the irony is hardly lost on you that in wanting to live, to learn, to find yourself, you’ve gotten lost.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“The world is wide, and he’s seen so little of it with his own eyes. He wants to travel, to take photos, listen to other people’s stories, maybe make some of his own. After all, life seems very long sometimes, but he knows it will go so fast, and he doesn’t want to miss a moment.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“She wanted to want it, to feel what the other girls felt.
But she didn't. And yet, Olivia is full of want. She wants a bed that does not creak. A room without Anabelles or matrons or ghouls. A window and a grassy view and air that does not taste of soot and a father who does not die and a mother who does not leave and a future beyond the walls of Merilance.”
― Victoria Schwab, Gallant