There Ain't No Sin. There Ain't No Virtue. There's Just Stuff People Do.

"Weetzie" he said, kissing her mouth. "You are my Marilyn. You are my lake full of fishes. You are my sky set, my 'Hollywood in miniature', my pink Cadillac, my highway, my martini, the stage for my heart to rock and roll on, the screen where my movies light up" he said.

'Dangerous Angels' by Francesca Lia Block 

Odysseus had twenty years to shed his battle skin. My grandfather left the battlefield in France and rode home in a ship that crawled across the ocean slowly so he could catch his breath. I get on a plane in hell and get off, hours later, at home.

‘The Impossible Knife of Memory’ by Laurie Halse Anderson

When a child first catches adults out - when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgements are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just - his world falls into panic desolation. The Gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of Gods; they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.

'East of Eden' by John Steinbeck

Grief settles comfortably into any host; it is an ever-mutating, vigorous organism with an ever-renewing customer base. It generates a never-ending hunger, a never-ending ache, an unassuageable pain to new hearts, brains, guts every minute, every day, every year.It is the razor edge of a loose tooth shrieking to be pressed again and again into the soft pink sore gum. It’s a one-way tunnel with no proof of another exit.

'Wildlife' by Fiona Wood