Love is a luxury.””No. Love is an element.”An element. Like air to breathe, earth to stand on.
It was brave,” countered Issa. “It was rare. It was love, and it was beautiful.
I know it’s not easy for you, living this life, but try to remember, always try to remember, you’re not the only one with troubles.
Brimstone once told me that to stay true in the face of evil is a feat of strength.
It’s not like there’s a law against flying.””Yes there is. The law of gravity.
Anyone who takes on my sister,” he had postured once, all puffed-out bravado, “will have to deal with …my sister.” And then he’d dived behind her and cowered.
And they were quiet but their blood and nerves and butterflies were not—they were rampantly alive, rushing and thrumming in a wild and perfect melody, matched note for note.
Hope can be a powerful force. Maybe there’s no actual magic in it, but when you know what you hope for most and hold it like a light within you, you can make things happen, almost like magic.
Because hope comes from in you, and wishes are just magic.
He’d sooner die trying to hold the world on his shoulders than running away. Better always to run toward. And so he did.
He danced with the sky instead, and the sky dropped him like a rotten plum.
I was going to say the beginning is the good part, when it’s all sparks and sparkles, before they are inevitably unmasked as assholes.
There was only present, and it was infinite. The past and the future were just blinders we wore so that infinity wouldn’t drive us mad.
Be a Samurai.Because you just never know what’s behind the freaking sky.
Don’t look at me like that,” said Ruza.”Like what?””Like I’m a beautiful book you’re about to open and plunder with your greedy mad eyes.
…but one can’t be irredeemable who shows reverence for books.
As for fairy tales, he understood that they were reflections of the people who had spun them, and were flecked with little truths – intrusions of reality into fantasy, like toast crumbs on a wizard’s beard.
On the occasions that he did look up from the page, he would seem as though he were awakening from a dream.
He wasn’t an alchemist, or a hero. He was a librarian, and a dreamer. He was a reader, and the unsung expert on a long-lost city no one cared a thing about.
It was a different life out here, but make no mistake: Lazlo was every bit the dreamer he had always been, if not more. He might have left his books, but he carried all his stories with him.
Even if it was just walls and a roof with papers inside, it had bewitched him, and drawn him in, and given him everything he needed to become himself.
Why not open the door, and open their arms, and close them again around each other? Did the not understand how, in the strange chemistry of human emotion, his suffering and her, mingled together, could… countervail each other?
Peace is more than the absence of war. Peace is accord. Harmony.
And just so you know, the invaders are always the bad guys. Always.
It was impossible, of course. But when did that ever stop any dreamer from dreaming.
If you’re afraid of your own dreams, you’re welcome here in mine.
I turned my nightmares into fireflies and caught them in a jar.
Creamy and leggy, with long azure hair and the eyes of a silent-movie star, she moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx.
Is that all souls are for? For when we die?” “No. They’re for living, too.
It is bodies that make us real. What is a soul without eyes to look through or hands to hold?
He read while he walked. He read while he ate. The other librarians suspected he somehow read while he slept, or perhaps didn’t sleep at all.
What’s a horizon?’ Lazlo asked, straight-faced. ‘Is it like the end of an aisle of books?
He drifted about with his head full of myths, always at least half lost in some otherland of story. Demons and wingsmiths, seraphim and spirits, he love it all.
It was the hate of the used and tormented, who are the children of the used and tormented, and whose own children will be used and tormented.
Life and peace. Victory and vengeance.And never the twain shall meet.
You really think joy is easier to come by than pain? What have you had more of?
It was sadness, lostness, and the worst thing about it was the way it seemed like a default—like it was there all the time, and all her other expressions were just an array of masks she used to cover it up.
For the way loneliness is worse when you return to it after a reprieve—like the soul’s version of putting on a wet bathing suit, clammy and miserable.
You’re a storyteller. Dream up something wild and improbable,” she pleaded. “Something beautiful and full of monsters.”“Beautiful and full of monsters?”“All the best stories are.
And that’s how you go on. You lay laughter over the dark parts. The more dark parts, the more you have to laugh. With defiance, with abandon, with hysteria, any way you can.
Your soul sings to mine. My soul is yours, and it always will be, in any world.
Get out of doors, Strange. Breathe air, see things. A man should have squint lines from looking at the horizon, not just from reading in dim light.
The dream chooses the dreamer, not the other way around….
What’s the point of being old if you can’t beleaguer the young with your vast stores of wisdom?And what’s the point of being young if you can’t ignore all advice?
I think you’re a fairy tale. I think you’re magical, and brave, and exquisite. And I hope you’ll let me be in your story.
Happiness wasn’t a mystical place to be reached or won-some bright terrain beyond the boundary of misery, a paradise waiting for them to find it-but something to carry doggedly through everything.
She may have been the one whose name meant music, but his sounded like it. Saying it made her want to sing it, to lean out a window and call him home. To whisper it in the dark.
If you can kill it, or it can kill you, it’s real.
He believed in magic, like a child, and in ghosts, like a peasant.
Skathis might have been an artist, but he’d been a vile one. Strange the dreamer was an artist, too, and he was the antidote to vile.
She had inherited a story that was strewn with corpses and clotted with enmity, and was only trying to stay alive in it.
to stay true in the face of evil is a feat of strength
What do you think I live on, rainwater and daydreams?
I’m not looking for fate. I’m seventeen. I’m looking for kissing, and to move forward a few paces on the game board. You know, do some Living. (With my lips.)
As long as you’re alive, there’s always a chance things will get better.
..and when he let her go, it was as if she had been filled and didn’t realize it until he pulled away and the absence rushed back in.
There is the past, and there is the future. The present is never more than the single second dividing one from the other. We live poised on that second as it’s hurtling forward—toward what?
He didn’t believe in magic and demons. He believed in day and night, endurance and fury, cold mud and loneliness and the speed with which blood leaves the body
I don’t believe in prayer, but I do believe in magic, and I want to believe in miracles.
His eyes are blue, and blue eyes up close are a celestial phenomenon: nebulae as seen through telescopes, the light of unnamed stars diffused through dusts and elements and endlessness. Layers of light. Blue eyes are starlight.
To be one of a pair of bodies that knew that melting fusion. To reach and find. To be and reached for and found. To belong to a mutual certainty. To wake up holding hands.
What was he? Storyteller and secretary and doer of odd jobs, neither Tizerkane nor delegate, just someone along for the dream.
Again his memory failed to conjure her face. It was like trying to call up a melody while another song played.
…something was starting to take shape, out of magic and will. Smoke and bone.
The door opened. She looked in the mirror and suppressed a curse. Slipping in behind some tourists, that winged shadow was back again. Karou rose and made for the bathroom, where she took the note that Kishmish had come to de
His shadow splayed out huge before him, and his mind gleamed with ancient wars and winged beings, a mountain of melted demon bones and the city on the far side of it–a city that had vanished in the mists of time.
Life doesn’t need magic to be magical.(But a little bit sure doesn’t hurt.)
What a lovely display of personhood. He’s like a good book cover that grabs your gaze. Read me. I’m fun but smart. You won’t be able to put me down.
Around Mik, my powers desert me. I lose basic motor function, like my brain focuses all neural activity on my lips and shifts into kiss preparedness mode way too early, to the detriment of things like speech, and walking.
Perhaps Fate laid out your life for you like a dress on a bed, and you could either wear it or go naked.
If only it were that easy to let go of hate. Just relax your face.
You think good people can’t hate?” she asked. “You think good people don’t kill?”[…}”Good people do all the things bad people do, Lazlo. It’s just that when they do them, they call it justice.
Some kinds of misery make you hate the world, but some kinds make you hate yourself, and–butter and cheese not withstanding–Neve had no question that Spear was the latter.
It was interesting the way a small hate could grow inside a big hate and take it over.
There was no echo, no reverberation. If anything the room ate sound. It swallowed her voice, her words, and her eternal, inadequate apology. But not her memories. She would never be rid of those.
The silence, she thought, was remarkable: a perfect, shimmering thing, and fragile. Like glass, if it shattered, it would never come back together again.
There was darkness, and monsters vast as worlds swam in it.
I write because, as wonderful as life is – and it is truly wonderful – it isn’t enough. It does not, for example, contain dragons. I find this unsatisfactory. So I read. And I write.
…looking up at the stars, he had accepted life as a medium for action. Something to wield like a tool. One’s own life: an instrument for the shaping of the world.
I want to touch with my mouth. His mouth, with my mouth. Maybe his neck, too. But first things first: Make him aware I exist.It’s possible that he is already aware, if only in a ‘don’t step on the small girl’ kind of way.
It was the only lullaby she would ever sing, and it was sung in Hell.
As for Ellai, she told her sister what had passed, and Nitid wept, and her tears fell to earth and became chimaera, children of regret…
She wanted to be free, and if she could never be free, at least she wanted to be brave – brave enough not to sell herself, no matter what the payment, or the cost of refusing.
Liraz snorted, caught off guard, and the tension between them ebbed away. “I’m sorry of my almost dying interrupted your almost kissing.
His lips made a grim twist that was like the joyless cousin of a smile.
And… a bed. A bed and a blanket to cover them, a blanket that was theirs together.
The eye’s perception of texture is pale compared to the lips’, and I didn’t know what velvety was until I knew it with my lips. Oh, kissing. Oh, violin boy.
Papilio stomachus: fragile creatures, vulnerable to forst and betrayal.
This wasn’t a person, Zuzana thought, this was greed wearing skin.
What can a soldier do when mercy is treason, and he is alone in it?
You’ve got to have, like, a lentil for a soul to hate wiener dogs.
There was a man who loved the moon, but whenever he tried to embrace her, she broke into a thousand pieces and left him drenched, with empty arms.
It was cruel. Like opening a birdcage to let the bird fly out, whilst all the while it’s tethered by the leg, and freedom is only an illusion.
It’s never too soon to worry. Worry spurs preparation.
I feel liquefied, like a cucumber forgotten in the crisper drawer, and I want to hold myself at arm’s length and carry me to the trash. Who is this sack of slush masquerading as me? It’s intolerable.
There are boys you look at and want to touch with your mouth, and there are boys you look at and want to wear one of those surgical masks everyone in China had during bird flu. There are a lot more bird-flu boys at large.
Did you know that mako shark fetuses eat each other in the womb?… Its true. Only cannibal fetuses survive to be born. Can you imagine if people were like that?
The dragon, you know, hunkered in the village devouring maidens, heard the townsfolk cry ‘Monster!’ and looked behind him.
It is a condition of monsters that they do not perceive themselves as such. The dragon, you know, hunkered in the village devouring maidens, heard the townsfolk cry ‘Monster!’ and looked behind him