Shannon

“I didn't kill Gabriel. Gabriel killed me. All I did was pull the trigger.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient

“...when your child dies, you feel everything you'd expect to feel, feelings so well-documented by so many others that I won't even bother to list them here, except to say that everything that's written about mourning is all the same, and it's all the same for a reason - because there is no read deviation from the text. Sometimes you feel more of one thing and less of another, and sometimes you feel them out of order, and sometimes you feel them for a longer time or a shorter time. But the sensations are always the same.

But here's what no one says - when it's your child, a part of you, a very tiny but nonetheless unignorable part of you, also feels relief. Because finally, the moment you have been expecting, been dreading, been preparing yourself for since the day you became a parent, has come.

Ah, you tell yourself, it's arrived. Here it is.

And after that, you have nothing to fear again.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“I would continue to survive, knowing, as I'd known that night in the meadow, that I was special, that I was born with a different kind of morality. The morality of an animal -- of a crow or a fox or an owl -- and not of a normal human being.”
― Peter Swanson

“I was so disappointed. It was not personal. It was not anything Jenna had done or hadn't done. I just wanted a little red-haired girl to match my boy and my wife with the flame-coloured hair. This was the picture in my mind, the image I had when I thought about my family. The real Jenna did not fit, because she looked like my mother instead of her own.”
― Samantha Downing, My Lovely Wife