You see her as you see anyone in this world: distorted, warped, reflected, refracted, contorted, mutilated by time.
Of course she cheated. Don’t be silly. Snow White spent half her growing years shuffling cards for no one. She can cut false and she can cut true, but she wasn’t going to lose when it counted.
The Sirens flicked their wings at the wall, inscribing it with their own blue ink: Even in penance is beauty; blessed are all the ocean’s drowned!
A stepmother is like a bullet you can’t dig out. She fires true and she fires hot and she fires so quick that her metal hits your body before you even know there’s a fight on.
One of her dearest and handsomest friends was a sorcerer, and from him she had learned so much magic even her hairpins got up and started living serious-minded lives, writing hairpin-ballads, celebrating hairpin-holidays, and inventing several new schools of philosophy.
Think about it, mate: How could a species like that develop the massive technology you need to achieve faster-than-light interstellar travel, yeah? All they do is hunt and eat. They’re just stupid murderlumps or killbots supreme with a side of zombie-mayonnaise. Where’s the nerdy shy Predator scientist who figured out how to build a spaceship while all the big jock Predators were down the pub ripping one another’s spines out, eh? Nowhere, because she don’t exist.
How long was it, between the time when you were happy, and the time when you wanted to kill him?
Storytelling can save you. Both the telling and the listening.
A child equals the mass of Fairyland times the speed of luck squared.
And that is the last lesson of childhood: You spend all your years fighting against the injustice of big folk and their big rules until you are ready to rule yourself.
Some kinds of hurt almost feel good, you know? Familiar. Like an ugly couch in your parents’ house with the springs all bare where your daddy slapped you once for coming home late and now when you sleep on it it’s like one of those Indian fellas napping on nails but it makes you feel like you come from somewhere. Hurts like home.
Up to no good may mean up to something interesting!
What was magical at two in the morning was tawdry and cheap and dangerous to your health at two in the afternoon.
People are mostly happiest when they think they’re just about to get the thing they want most. Before and after, they’re all monsters.
But something older and wiser within her said, Some things are for hiding and for keeping.
Lawlessness doesn’t mean there’s no law, you know, it just means that there are a lot of different laws slugging it out in the streets, and none of them have come out on top yet.
Things I Will Try to Say More Often: Why? I love you. I’m sorry. May I have chocolate? Yes. yes. yes.
One is always homesick for places where one came to grief.
A girl who never smiles has such power – what men will do to turn up but one corner of her mouth! She already wears her red war-gown and her circlet of cinnabar poppies. They bring out the color in her grimace.
It’s a dreadful world with only your own heart to drive you.