A prophetic world that can never come true.
When you argue with verve in your saddlebags, you are extremely alive. That is why you yell and holler and shake your fist – could there be anything sweeter than convincing someone to see the world your way? What else is talking for, or jokes, or stories, or battles? The Loudest Magic, and how I loved it.
You’re better off – theatrical folk are nothing but a bundle of monologues and anxiety headaches.
Zelda was winter’s best dame: pale and dark with a shimmer of Christmas in her eye, a flash of New Year’s in her laugh.
I was happy, the sun was high. I had enough.
After so long keeping to herself and tending her secret quietly, all these words just bubbled up out of her her like cool golden champagne.
September felt sure that her shadow and everyone’s shadows were all part of the same broken thing, and broken things were to be fixed, whatever the cost, especially if you had been the one to break it in the first place.
They start setting up on a little left stage playing my secret favorite song: the rustling of sheet music and set lists, the coughing and quiet warm-up, the tuning of instruments, squeak of speakers and amps, the last rags on cigarettes and popping of knuckles.
One doesn’t behave at all the same way to a grandfather as to a bosom friend, to a professor as to a curious niece.
Most people don’t like complexity. They would prefer the world to be simple.
That’s how it goes – as soon as there’s anything interesting in Ancient Greece, some arsehole with a magic hat comes along to murder it.
The calligrapher coughed, for his room was very dusty, and there was dust even on his eyelashes, and said: “It is right and proper,” he said, “for a girl to read as many books as there are bricks in this city, and then, when she is finished, to begin to write new ones which are made out of the old ones, as this city is made of those stones.
A silent Library is a sad Library. A Library without patrons on whom to pile books and tales and knowing and magazines full of up-to-the-minute politickal fashions and atlases and plays in pentameter! A Library should be full of exclamations!
Hounds and hearthstones, girl, haven’t you ever heard a story about Koschei? He’s only got the one. Act one, Scene one: pretty girl. Act one, Scene two: pretty girl gone!
I’m quite civilized, I promise,’ Manythanks sniffed, smiling. ‘Wairwulves are cultured. We have choirs and charity races and rotary clubs. It’s when we’re human that you must take care.
Sometimes, magic is like that. It lands on your head like a piano, a stupid, ancient, unfunny joke, and you spend the rest of your life picking sharps and flats out of your hair.
It was late spring when Marya Morevna slid her brass key into the lock of the house on Dzerzhinskaya Street, feeling it slide, too, between her own ribs, and open her like a reliquary full of old, nameless bones.
Heroes in motion tend to stay in motion, but villains in motion tend toward mass destruction.
We hold demonstrations and civil wars when inequities are discovered.
A Fairy must make her own way in the world, for the world will never make way for her. That, incidentally, is the First Theorem of Questing Physicks, which.