Things which are gone in the morning: sleep, darkness, grief, the moon. Women. Dreams.
You will live as you live in any world,′ Madame Lebedeva said. She reached out her hand as if to grasp Marya’s, as if to press it to her cheek, then closed her fingers, as if Marya’s hand were in hers. ‘With difficulty, and grief.
I am certainly intrepid and splendid and sordid and strong; I can see why you’d want me! But I’m afraid I’ve left the kettle on or whatever it is people say when they’re bored.
No one knows themselves very well. Who has the time these days? Have you been formally introduced to yourself? Made the effort to get to know your faults and your strengths, sit yourself down to tea and listen to all your troubles, answered the call when yourself falters? Then how can you say you know yourself in the least?
You always trade blood for joy. It’s always a deal struck in the wet and the dark. Al didn’t make the rules. He just dances to the song that’s playing.
I opened my door and everything they had for me was tainted because the land of Used-to-Be is just full of ghosts starving for your breath.
And Miss Oleander Coy had herself a blue mouth. Little stains at the edges of her raspberry lips where she put her pen when she was thinking, which was always.
She could be quite brave in the presence of a Wyverary, but tall and lovely ladies made her shy, even if they were made of soap.
Breakfast brought an oppressive gloom down upon my spirit. Soft-boiled eggs oozed a golden ichor of loneliness onto my spoon; the buttered rolls spoke only of the further torment of my being. Failure swirled in the milky depths of my tea and the bacon I devoured was the bacon of grief.
For a witch is nothing without her Spoon.
September drank in the starry sky with a longing and a tugging and a sigh. All the way up, to that enormous crescent in the black.
You haven’t met your Way yet. It hasn’t so much as kissed your hand! You haven’t even at the door of the hall where your Way dances. But look here, look see, I’ve got them, I’ve caught them up just for you, a big bouquet of anywhere you want to go. Just pick a bloom, my girl, hold it to your pretty nose.
It’s a funny thing. You go your whole life thinking you’re the protagonist, but really, you’re just backstory.
I suppose because it’s boring to keep telling stories where people just get born and grow up and get married and die. So they add strange things in, to make it interesting when a person is born, more satisfying when they get married, sadder when they die.
The thing I hate about being dead is you can’t move on. I was in love with him when I died, so I’ll be in love with him till the sun burns out.
You can’t fix a bad man like a bad staircase.
Human contact is a terrible drug. Sometimes, you’ll even take the hit you know is tainted. You can’t stop yourself. The need is too strong.
Monsters, you know, cannot appreciate the niceties of commandments carved in stone.
But old women faced certain dangers in Fairyland, such as breaking a hip while riding a wild velocipede, or having everyone do what you say just because you had wrinkles.
Everything in the world, it turns out, is escapable except economy.