“Forgive her for how her agony reveals itself, child. This is how blood magic works. Unconditional never meant perfect anyway.”

What I have spent in mourning is the price I have paid for my healing.

Even without him, you can bring down monsters. Believe me. You can still bring down monsters.

My Fairy Godmother is my heart sustaining me.

When I held her, I held her gently so that she always knew she could fly away and I would never harm her or clip her wings.

She’s a woman in love and is loved in return. That is a powerful thing.

The world is not allowed to make a meal of you, girl. It is there for your consuming.

You are permitted to be cruel sometimes, and you are allowed to fall apart, and feel every emotion they tell you not to feel.

I am more powerful than I am damaged and I will rise from any abyss you drown me in.

And she needs no prince or knight to save her, because her might is enough to tame dragons.

Survival is ugly. Healing is messy. Self-love is complicated.

So when they ask you what you weigh, you don’t need to look down at any scale. Instead, simply tell them the truth; tell them how you weigh whole universes and storms and scars and stories, too.

Before we had mouths or language or hope, we still had love. I know it’s not much. But my god, it’s beautiful and on so many days it is enough.

If a woman does not fit the shape of what you think a woman should, if a woman is not obedient, does not see things the way you do, if a woman is too independent to need anything more than herself, does she automatically become a threat filled with such terror to you?

It has taken me some time to learn that although karma exists, you can let your hatred go, not by destroying your own magic but by letting it grow.

The worst story I know is my heart. The best story I know is my heart. Both these truths know how to exist together in ways I never thought I will learn. This is the quietest of victories.

Love someone who is kinder to you than you are to yourself.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.

To save a man and thereby to spare a father’s agony and a mother’s feelings is not to do a noble deed, it is but an act of humanity.

Grief is the agony of an instant; the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.

There is no answer to Auschwitz…To try to answer is to commit a supreme blasphemy. Israel enables us to bear the agony of Auschwitz without radical despair

The thorn is a bridge spanning the muddy depths of agony and sorrow so that one may on the other side dance to the drums of the rose of joy.

I’m half agony, half hope – like I’m a freshly cut bone, like the last stone that was held – then not thrown, like a garden where inspiration roots but never grows.

When she’s drenched in agony and soaked in pain, her smile holds the art this world is dying to learn.

I hate and love. You ask, perhaps, how can that be? I know not, but I feel the agony.