The Fairies called it a paw because they wanted to believe I was an animal-and not the sort of animal that discusses junkyard philosophy and enjoys Turkish coffee and knows Bone Magic and holds down a mortgage, no, the kind you can cut up for meat and only feel bad about it on Fridays. It’s easier to use somebody if you can think of them as mute and dumb and made for your pleasure.
A body is never so vicious as when it has only itself to blame for its trouble.
A body can only deliver up the truth its bones know, Its blood, which is its history.
Do you think, if Columbus had stood on the bow of his ship, looked at the New World and understood everything to come, all the disease and death and betrayal, all the ugliness, all the blood – do you think he would have embraced it, called it paradise?
Strictly speaking,′ said the King of Fairies between mouthfuls, ‘I’m leasing you this food on a limited, bite-by-bite basis and a generous payment-deferral plan. I’d have thought someone would have told you about Fairy food. You always pay, lad. I’m not running a charity delicatessen.
No one’s good just from being born any place.
The Leucrotta looked appraisingly at Leander for a long while. “My skin, you say? I had not heard that it had any medicinal value, but if the Witch needs it, I must, as a gentleman and a monster, yield to her.” Both the Prince and the King started, shocked at the suggestion. “But we must have a battle!” insisted the Prince. “Don’t be ridiculous, boy. I would eviscerate you within a minute. Just take the skin and scurry back.
You’re looking very fine tonight, Grandmother! Why, you’ve hardly any warts at all! Bathing in blood again, I’ll warrant. Virgins or capitalists this time?
And in her long nights, in her long house of smoke and miller’s stones, she baked the bread we eat in dreams, strangest loaves, her pies full of anguish and days long dead, her fairy-haunted gingerbread, her cakes wet with tears.
Some who deserve failure do not achieve it,” he sniffed. “Some who deserve nothing are given the world.
There is still a place in me, Masha, where my death once lay. I have a pain there, the way some men feel their legs long after they’ve been cut off at the knee. It is my pain, and I cannot share it. I would not, even if I could. I will age with you, if it will please you. I will match you, wrinkle for wrinkle, grey hair for grey hair, creak for creak, tumor for tumor. You will be so beautiful when you are old.
In my experience, folk find it nigh on impossible to call a thing what it is. It.
Magic is just a word for what’s left to the powerless once everyone else has eaten their fill.
For witches, there is but one King and one Palace – the one who has wronged them, and the house in which he lives. In fairness, Kings are often quite as dense, calling themselves sacred vessels and masters of all things above and below when in fact they command a few patches of lonely dirt with even lonelier houses sitting upon them.
What matters is entertainment. Eternity takes forever. The infinite expanse of time just does not know when to quit. The dead fear boredom the way mortals fear death.
You came!” he whispered. “How do you always find me?” The girl smiled. “Magic,” she whispered. “After all, I am a demon.” “You always come to the window, you come to find me and carry me away – that is not what girls are supposed to do. It is what the Princes do in all the stories.” “This is not that kind of story.
I was used and tricked and thrown away, but I cannot be forgiven. It’s a funny thing. You go your whole life thinking you’re the protagonist, but really, you’re just the backstory. The boys shrug and go on, they fight and blow things up and half of them do much worse... and still get a key to the city, and eventually you’re just a story your high school boyfriend tells the kid he had with his new wife.
Everything looks like magic when you don’t understand it.
Those Puritans would spice the Gallic stew of upper Maine for years, causing no end of trouble to Agnes, who, to be fair, was a witch and a succubus and everything else they ever called her, but that’s no excuse for being such poor neighbors, when you think about it.
I do not want to muddle about with Politicks, and whenever two Folk of any sort are in a room together there are always Politicks to be muddled in.