A choice is like a jigsaw puzzle, darling troll. Your worries are the corner pieces, and your hopes are the edge pieces, and you, Hawthorn, dearest of boys, are the middle pieces, all funny-shaped and stubborn. But the picture, the picture was there all along, just waiting for you to get on with it.
It tasted like a shade of white near blue; it tasted like the idea of pearls; it tasted like a memory nearly grasped but lost at the last moment.
What was a person, if not the things they knew and the face they wore?
Everybody is bizarre and disgusting and interesting and fixated on fetishes they wouldn’t admit to their grandmother on pain of vaporization and worthy of love. You are bizarre and disgusting and interesting and fixated on fetishes you wouldn’t admit to your grandmother on pain of vaporization and worthy of love.
She said you’d come and I swore to eat your heart.
He’ll burn you down like wax if you let him. You’ll think it’s love, when he dines on your heart. And maybe it will be.
So much light, sweet girl, begins in the dark.
You get the face you build your whole life, with work and loving and grieving and laughing and frowning.
Somewhere on Earth is an insect that excretes a golden antibacterial ooze that also does a splendid job sweetening your tea; a terribly picturesque tree whose bark will fix your malaria right up; and a large four-legged, two-horned mammal whose reproductive system dispenses ice cream, brie, and buttercream frosting.
The tales lovers tell each other about how they met are hushed and secret things. They change year by year, for we all meet many times as we grow up and become different and new and exciting people – and this never stops, even for a minute, even when we are ninety.
She was... unhappy. It was part of her, you could not separate her from it. She was sad the way a horse is strong or a bird flies.
He quirked an eyebrow briefly, slightly, in such a way that no one afterwards might be able to safely accuse him of having done it. Sei knew the look. Names are meaningless, plosives and breath, but those who liked the slope of her waist often made much of hers, which denoted purity, clarity – as though it had any more in the way of depth than others. They wondered, all of them, if she really was pure, as pure as her name announced her to be, all white banners and hymeneal grace.
A book is a door into another place and another heart and another world.
Did you never wonder why the old books are so full of dragons chasing after maidens? The serpents think the girls are orphans, and long to get them away in a lair so that they may grow up strong and tall.
And the funny, impish magic of a wrap party is that everyone still has scraps of their characters hanging off them like Salome’s veils, fluttering, fading, but not quite finished tangling the tongue and tripping the feet. You’re not in Wonderland anymore, but you positively reek of rabbit.
I am not a little girl anymore, dazzled by your magic. It is my magic, now, too.
I have survived, but I have not been spared.
Seraphim, you understand? Not frilly angels with blousy pink wings and haloes like wedding rings. These ones had wheels full of eyes and voices like the noise of the deep.
I don’t know why you would even bring up the internet. The xeno-intelligence officer responsible for evaluating your digital communication required invasive emergency therapy after an hour’s exposure. One glance at that thing is the strongest argument possible against the sentience of humanity. I wouldn’t draw attention to it, if I were you.
Punishment doesn’t mean you aren’t loved. On the contrary. You can only punish someone you love.