It’s the most marvelous and terrible thing in the world. Everyone, but everyone, is pretending to be someone else.
We always dreamed the same dreams, which was like living twice.
I’m an extra in your story. Well, you’re an extra in mine, boy.
He was the one who’d come back to life not fifteen minutes ago. Whenever he got sick at home, Aunt Elizabeth and Tabitha made a tremendous fuss with hot water bottles and tinctures and sweets and kisses. It only stood to reason that they should all make an extra-tremendous fuss now. After all, when you rose from the grave in England, people tended to make whole religions out of you.
When you are this hungry, you cannot even remember who you used to be, she whispered. Who you might have been, if not for the hunger.
Everything in this place was livid and lurid and living, and when he loved her and hurt her all at once she lived, too, higher and harder than she had thought she could.
Marya supposed this was why no one asked after stolen fairy tale girls. What embarrassments they turn out to be. They grow tempers; they join the army; they need glasses. Who wants them?
My old friends, you must help me! Tell me what it is that a girl does in the way that a spider weaves, so that Solace will not grow up to be the wrong sort of girl.” We like the wrong sorts of girls, they wrote. They are usually the ones worth writing about.
From that day forward she never used my name. Eventually I forgot it. Mrs. H called me something new. She named me cruel and smirking, she named me not for beauty or for cleverness or for sweetness. She named me a thing I could aspire to but never become, the one thing I was not and could never be: Snow White.
Kid, nobody really gets anywhere in this life. Everybody just picks someplace to hunker down and barricade themselves in. Some of us just got better bricks than others.
The point’s not what it costs; it’s what it costs you. Everything you have. That’s my price, that’s my prize, that’s my ransom, and that’s my rune. The only price in the world that matters is the one that hurts to pay.
I am Death,” said the creature. “I thought that was obvious.” “But you’re so small!” “Only because you are small. You are young and far from your Death, September, so I seem as anything would seem if you saw it from a long way off – very small, very harmless. But I am always closer than I appear. As you grow, I shall grow with you, until at the end, I shall loom huge and dark over your bed, and you will shut your eyes so as not to see me.
Nobody came without their sequins roaring.
If she was in a teaching mood she wasn’t in a hitting mood. Like sneezing and keeping your eyes open, Mrs. H couldn’t do both at once.
When you can change something just by saying a word, that is magic.
You can’t say no if you don’t have desires and opinions and wants of your own. You wouldn’t even want to. No is the heart of thinking.
The only price in the world that matters is the one that hurts to pay.
This was how it was done; you bare your belly to a great beast and endure trials and it all works itself out. There is a treasure or a sword. Or a woman. And that thing is yours not because you defeated anything, or because your flesh was hard and unyielding, but because you were worthy of it, worthy all along.
How we would like to argue with September, and tell her that in the waiting lies the pleasure! That we here in the world of sensible folk know how to wait without twisted-up bellies and tapping feet and wishing for the sun to hurry up and rise and set. That a clever person is never bored, and a bored person is never clever. But though I am sly, I am a trickster, I am even cruel – I cannot lie.
It is such hard work to keep your heart hidden! And worse, by the time you find it easy, it will be harder still to show it.