Katie Kenig

“While other girls were blurry, displaying cracks or, at the very least, seams
—
ripped jeans, coffee-stained T-shirts, hair that poufed up in the rain
—
Sophia always looked sharp, clear, as if the resolution had been turned up on a microscope and angled straight at her, as if the money had formed a kind of shrink wrap that kept her protected from the normal destruction of the everyday.”
― Lauren Oliver, Panic Origin Story

“Recently I've been having the fantasy more and more" the one where Tack and I run away, disappear under the wide-open sky into the forest with leaves like green hands, welcoming us. In my fantasy, the more we walk, the cleaner we get, like the woods are rubbing away the past few years, all the blood and the fighting and the scars - sloughing off the bad memories and the false starts, leaving us shiny and new, like dolls just taken out of the package.

And in this fantasy, my fantasy life, we find a stone cottage hidden deep in the forest, untouched, fitted with beds and rugs and plates and everything we need to live - like the owners just picked up and walked away, or like the house had been built for us and was just waiting all this time.

We fish the stream and hunt the woods in the summer. We grow potatoes and peppers and tomatoes big as pumpkins. In the winter we stay inside by the fire while snow falls around us like a blanket, stilling the world, cocooning it in sleep.”
― Lauren Oliver, Raven

“Don't cry anymore, she tells herself. Just do one thing at a time. Get from hour to hour and day to day like a frog jumping on lily pads.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

“Is the person I was before dead? Or will the worst things that happened to me eventually get diluted by the rest of my life, become just a part of the story that I've always been writing?”
― Rebecca Rosenblum, So Much Love