He didn’t reckon that God owed him anything. He reckoned that he’d had it all, and wasted it. Burning lakes and howling fiends had just never seemed that convincing, perils hardly fit to frighten naughty children. He turned over, staring up at the darkness. Damned…having found out now what hell was really like.

— Laura Kinsale

He tried not to cry as he wondered if he would ever have a home again.

— KayeC Jones

Howard: Sometimes a betrayal can be so subtle that it clouds the whole thing. Nita: It would have to be a real betrayal. Not like canceling an appointment. It would be like you’d end the relationship in the middle. Howard: Why would I call it off? Nita: I don’t know!

— Sarah E. Olson

Hugging himself, Oscar leaned against the pantry wall. For two days all he had wanted was for Caleb to come back, and now he was back and Oscar had made a mess of things: he had angered half the customers and confused the other half, and the coin boxes did not look as they should, and [rich, noble] people were complaining about him, and he couldn't look at anybody, and [redacted] was dead, and Oscar was odd.' What if he doesn't keep me?

— Anne Ursu

I am continuously struck by how frequently the various thought processes of the inner critic trigger overwhelming emotional flashbacks. This is because the PTSD-derived inner critic weds shame and self-hate about imperfection to fear of abandonment, and mercilessly drive the psyche with the entwined serpents of perfectionism and endangerment. Recovering individuals must learn to recognize, confront and disidentify from the many inner critic processes that tumble them back in emotional time to the awful feelings of overwhelming fear, self-hate, hopelessness and self-disgust that were part and parcel of their original childhood abandonment.

— Pete Walker

I believe the best service to the child is the service closest to the child, and children who are victims of neglect, abuse, or abandonment must not also be victims of bureaucracy. They deserve our devoted attention, not our divided attention.

— Kenny Guinn

I flopped on the overstuffed kitchen couch and watched him go. I wondered what would happen to all his films and photographs in the upstairs closet - the documentaries on homelessness and drug addiction, the funny short subjects, the half-finished romantic comedy, the boxes of slice-of-life photographs that spoke volumes about the human condition. Furthermore, I wondered how you stop caring about what you've ached over, sweated over. (Th wonk)

— Joan Bauer

I had not said anything about what had happened the day before—about being scared down to my very bones when I thought they had left me. I don't know what came over me. Ever since my mother left us that April day, I suspected that everyone was going to leave, one by one.

— Sharon Creech

I lay in bed and watched moments break into phenomenal particles of panic and could actually see the divine crack of God’s ass as he completely turned his back on me.

— Arthur Nersesian

In a blacked-out house, stripped of all comforts, it's easy to turn your anger outward, to attack this city he's lying at the center of, with its filth and its pollution and its oppression, but really, New York is the only thing that's never abandoned him.

— Garth Risk Hallberg