Kristine

“It helped that Celia Ray could walk into a joint like nobody I’ve ever seen. She would throw her resplendence into a room ahead of her, the way a soldier might throw a grenade into a machine gunner’s nest, and then she would follow her beauty right on in and assess the carnage.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“You had to finish a story to know all the answers, and life was no different. Nothing was ever handed to you from the start.”
― Etaf Rum, A Woman Is No Man

“Glory looks at the two small scars on her hands, one in the center of each palm, the body doing its work. [...] The girl who stood up and fell back down, who grabbed onto a barbed wire fence and stopped herself from falling again. The girl who walked barefoot across the desert and saved her own life. She can't imagine any other way to tell the story.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine

“In the church where I grew up, we were taught that sin, even if it happens only in your heart, condemns you all the same. Grace is not assured to any of us, maybe not even most of us, and while being saved gives you a fighting chance, you must always hope that the sin lodged in your heart, like a bullet that cannot be removed without killing you, is not of the mortal kind.”
― Elizabeth Wetmore, Valentine