“The beauty of life is that you can choose to shape your pain, or let it shape you. Yet here is its secret. That which mars most deeply can be transformed to greatness. The most heinous injury can become beauty! This is the secret of art as I know it.
The Dragon Librarian (Scrolls of Fire Book 1) by Marc Secchia
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Walking down to the water’s edge, I tried to picture myself the way my new friends saw me, or wanted to: not as Jacob, the kid who once broke his ankle running after an ice cream truck, or who reluctantly and at the behest of his dad tried and failed three times to get onto his school’s noncompetitive track team, but as Jacob, inspector of shadows, miraculous interpreter of squirmy gut feelings, seer and slayer of real and actual monsters—and all that might stand between life and death for our merry band of peculiars. How could I ever live up to my grandfather’s legacy?
–Hollow City: The Second Novel in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
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…a silent goodbye, to a place that had changed me forever—and the place that, more than any graveyard, would forever contain the memory, and the mystery, of my grandfather. They were linked inextricably, he and that island, and I wondered, now that both were gone, if I would ever really understand what had happened to me: what I had become; was becoming. I had come to the island to solve my grandfather’s mystery, and in doing so I had discovered my own. Watching Cairnholm disappear felt like watching the only remaining key to that mystery sink beneath the dark waves. And then the island was simply gone, swallowed up by a mountain of fog.
–Hollow City: The Second Novel in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
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I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen. The first of these came as a terrible shock and, like anything that changes you forever, split my life into halves: Before and After.
–Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs