"She knew what the short answer was, but "war" didn't sum up the feeling of unease. The closest comparison she had was "magic."

"It's a strange thing, Happiness" [he] said "There are times when we feel like we don't deserve it. What a beautiful thing to be able to revisit that lull in between that caters to contentment and safety." 

"The mind could not translate what it no longer remembered. He wondered if the heart could still feel the loss." 

"I've always preferred the version of me that Alex brings out to the one I was back in our hometown. This Poppy feels safe in the world, because he's in it too."

"Maybe, like me, when we're together he feels like no one else is there, like they're phantoms we dreamed up as set dressing."

"I hope he heard the smile in my voice the way I hear it in his."

"You are fierce, you were born to survive anything. I remember that night in the woods and the way you snarled at us like a she-wolf. You believe you were cut out for some glorious destiny, as all great men do. But women are not granted such destinies in this world."

"How he had survived in a world where he had not looked after his own interests, was a testament to the God's given advantage every man wore like a crown."

“Upon my word sir,” cried Elizabeth, “your hope is a rather extraordinary one after my declaration. I do assure you that I am not one of those young ladies, if such young ladies there are, who are so daring as to risk their happiness on the chance of being asked a second time. I am perfectly serious in my refusal. You could not make me happy, and I am convinced that I am the last woman in the world who could make you so.”

In spite of his being a lover, Elizabeth really believed all his expectations of felicity to be rationally founded, because they had for basis the excellent understanding and super excellent disposition of Jane, and a general similarity of feeling and taste between her and himself.

“I have said no such thing. I am only resolved to act in that manner which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness, without reference to you, or to any person so wholly unconnected with me.”

Adrenaline shook my limbs as I rolled onto my back. The sky was stormy black. There should be stars, I thought. There should be fireworks. There should be great, roaring bursts of rockets to celebrate this moment. 

"You don't see the people around you. You're so focussed on what you want. What you think you need. So sure you're right. And you hurt the people around you in your stampede after it." 

Keep holding on. Their escape was as much in my hands as mine was in theirs. Our life stories ran intertwined through this narrow gap in time and none of us knew what lay on the other side.

The lighthouse had been there for too long and seen too many violent storms to retain anything of that Friday night when {removed} tried to kill me. The wind and rain scoured every corner clean of moss, spider webs, and memories.

The sea was the giant woman of the planet, fluid and contrary. All men shuddered as they gazed at her surface. 

Many women straddle my waist, many sit over me, drop their hair over me, and every man knows this is to see a woman in her full power.

Obliterated by the storm that had come for the mermaid, they spiralled into a vast vortex of debris.

I learnt it the hard way, but I learnt to be a woman is to be one’s own woman, and with all due respect, we don’t need your space, we carve our own. 

Perhaps you fear the Medusa that sits within each of our faces, and shrink back from the heat that snakes through our blood.

The speculum was first invented by a doctor whose contributions are misrepresented. The testing of that instrument was first forced between a black woman’s legs. Patient unconsenting, and doctor unrelenting, because lives run cheap when they aren’t white, as the ocean floors may remind you.