Cher

“Books were her salvation. As a child, she’d had a shelf of childhood favorites that she loved enough to read over and over again. But after, during the hospital stay and the long voyage and the cold days in Idlewild’s dreary hallways, books became more than mere stories. They were her lifeline, the pages as essential to her as breathing.”
― Simone St. James, The Broken Girls

“Books, Sonia had decided, were what she would live with when she finally left this place. She would work in a library—any library, anywhere. She’d sweep the floors if she had to. But she’d work in a library, and she’d read the books every day for the rest of her life.”
― Simone St. James, The Broken Girls

“This isn't the ending I dreamed of, sure. But when you realize failing doesn't make you a failure, you give yourself permission to try all sorts of things.”
― Lauren Fleshman, Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man's World

“There was no Internet, no way to raise outrage via a Twitter campaign, no digital cameras with which one could take a photo and send it worldwide in seconds.” And that left Ravensbrück abandoned and dismantled, forgotten.”
― Simone St. James, The Broken Girls