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“Abandonment. What did that really mean? That I was left? That I had learned to leave my self. That I would retell the story until I found a different ending. Until I learned to stay.”
― Abandon Me: Memoirs
― Abandon Me: Memoirs
“And this, even more wonderful and mysterious, is also true: when I read it, when I read what Julie's written, she is instantly alive again, whole and undamaged. With her words in my mind while I'm reading, she is as real as I am. Gloriously daft, drop-dead charming, full of bookish nonsense and foul language, brave and generous. She's right here. Afraid and exhausted, alone, but fighting. Flying in silver moonlight in a plane that can't be landed, stuck in the climb - alive, alive, ALIVE.”
― Code Name Verity
― Code Name Verity
“It's disquieting to reflect that one's dreams never symbolize one's real wishes, but always something Much Worse... If I really wanted to be passionately embraced by Peter, I should dream of dentists or gardening. I wonder what unspeakable depths of awfulness can only be expressed by the polite symbol of Peter's embraces?”
― Gaudy Night
― Gaudy Night
“We really want the undoing of our earliest wounds and sometimes, in our attempts to correct the errors of our childhoods, we choose the exact thing we hope to avoid. We recognize a chance for love's redemption and run toward it. We hope for a different ending.”
― Abandon Me: Memoirs
― Abandon Me: Memoirs
“Call it grace, call it survival, call it strength—whatever allowed me to seize that moment of clarity and insist that what I was searching for was not in any cloistered room. It is something that my brother and I were given by our parents and the ways that they loved us. It is a fundamental belief in the worth of one's own life. It is the knowledge of true love, and the belief that we are capable givers and receivers of it.”
― Abandon Me: Memoirs
― Abandon Me: Memoirs
Shay’s 2025 Year in Books
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