I was making a different sort of heart, one that was black, one that was protected by thorns, by bats, by raven’s wings, by sorrow, by my aloneness, my armour.
They believed all books should be read, for as long as the reader liked.
If this was what angels observed when they gazed upon our world, how we might murder each other and cause one another agony, then I pitied them as I pitied no others.
Love is complicated, love can be hidden, love, above all else, is loyalty.
She’d bought a blue notebook in the pharmacy to write down her aunt’s remedies. Star tulip to understand dreams, bee balm for a restful sleep, black mustard seed to repel nightmares, remedies that used essential oils of almond or apricot or myrrh from thorn trees in the desert. Two eggs, which must never be eaten, set under a bed to clean a tainted atmosphere. Vinegar as a cleansing bath. Garlic, salt, and rosemary, the ancient spell to cast away evil.
There was a spark inside that holiest of holy places that made people want to possess it, and what men yearn for they often destroy.
She has an eye for tragedy and sorrow.
He wondered why it was only when you were at the end of your life that it was possible to view it with honesty and truth.
There’s a little witch in all of us.
Some things are best remembered the way you want to remember them, like this road, these stars, this girl right beside him as they walk into the center of the cold night, looking straight ahead.
All that will ever be has already been written long before it happens. There is nothing we can do to stop it.
Franny whispered to Haylin all that she ever was and had been. She told him that she had always known what the future would be, and he said that if what she said was true, then she should have known a very long time ago that this was meant to be.
You know who you are. And I suggest you never deny it.
She takes the fortune cookies from the bottom of the bag and throws them into a glass bowl she keeps in the closet. She has no desire to know what her future might hold.
She wishes he would come to her tonight, climb in through the window to lie down beside her and explain how it’s possible to love someone so much and still manage to carry on when you have to let them go.
If she doesn’t make a move soon, they’re all going to pass her by and she’ll still be a child, afraid to leave her room, afraid to grow up.
Then I understood that when someone begins to tell you her story, you are entwined together. Perhaps even more so if the ending hasn’t been divulged. It was exactly like dreaming the same dream, then waking too soon and never finding out what had happened.
The truth frightens people because it isn’t stable. It shifts every day. If you’d prefer to remain in the dark, I would understand.
On some nights it was best to remember the past, and not shut it in a drawer. Three hundred years ago people believed in the devil. They believed if an incident could not be explained, then the cause was something wicked, and that cause was often a woman who was said to be a witch. Women who did as they pleased, women with property, women.
People said love was the antidote to hate, that it could mend what was most broken, and give hope in the most hopeless of times.