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“...because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man.”
― Louisa May Alcott

“I can’t lose the thing I’ve held onto for so long, you know?�� My face twists up from the pain of pushing it out. “I just really need it to be a love story, you know? I really, really need it to be that.��
“I know,�� she says.
“Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it��? I look to her glassy eyes, her face of wide open empathy. “It’s my life,�� I say. “This has been my whole life.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“Strange, isn’t it? To love a book. When the words on the pages become so precious that they feel like part of your own history because they are. It’s nice to finally have someone read stories I know so intimately.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“We are all stardust and stories.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“Everyone wants the stars. Everyone wishes to grasp that which exists out of reach. To hold the extraordinary in their hands and keep the remarkable in their pockets.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“But the world is strange and endings are not truly endings no matter how the stars might wish it so.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“For those who feel homesick for a place they’ve never been to. Those who seek even if they do not know what (or where) it is that they are seeking. Those who seek will find. Their doors have been waiting for them.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

“April hath put a spirit of youth in everything. (Sonnet XCVIII)”
― William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets

“Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It’s a sad season of life without growth…It has no day.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“The ink of the scholar is more holy than the blood of the martyr.”
― Anonymous, القرآن الكريم

“That was the cruelest irony: the more you did to save yourself, the less you became a person worth saving.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“I was a woman when it was convenient to blame me, and a girl when they wanted to use me.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“I wish I had fought.�� Effy surprised herself by saying it. The words had leaped out of her throat, unbidden. “I know I beat him in the end, but for so many years all I could do was run and hide. I just sat there and let the water pour in around me. I didn’t know that I could fight back. I didn’t know how to do anything but wait to drown.��
“Oh no, Effy. That’s not what I meant at all. You don’t have to take up a sword. Survival is bravery, too.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“It began as all things did: a girl on the shore, terrified and desirous.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“We must discuss, then, the relationship between women and water. When men fall into the sea, they drown. When women meet the water, they transform. It becomes vital to ask: is this a metamorphosis, or a homecoming?”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”
― Robert Frost

“The dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul--BOOKS.”
― Emily Dickinson

“Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“How terrible, to navigate the world without a story to comfort you.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“There was an intimacy to all violence, she supposed. The better you knew someone, the more terribly you could hurt them.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning