That was what made fighting so easy – you could always choose death rather than captivity.
The Weaver wove herself from the thread of night, hair of moonlight, skin of stars. So old. Without beginning or end.
She had thought the chewing and digesting were meant literally and wondered, horrified, why Mo had hung on his workshop door the words of someone who vandalized books.
The Fairy looked at the broken glass around her feet. Her shattered cage. And the one who’d put her in it was far, far away. But, no, she had caged herself.
She’d fallen in love with the wrong boy. But when did love ever bother about that?
The stars shone down on her like flowers made of light, and their beauty hurt her weary heart.
Loving someone merely meant pain. Nothing but pain.
They’re my children, my inky children, and I look after them well.
Fear was like a beast that only grew fiercer when one gave in to it.
Many of the snowflakes, he had told her, were tiny elves who kissed your face with icy lips before melting on your warm skin.
She was beginning to miss him when he wasn’t near.
My voice had bayou gut them slipping out of their story like a bookmark forgotten by a reader between the pages.
So often it is words or pictures that first tell us what we long for.
You soon get tired of what’s extraordinary, dragon rider. It’s often the most ordinary things that bring great happiness.
They forked up in the air for him, like trees branching in the night, and rained down sparks. They roared and whispered with their crackling voices, they had danced when he said the word. The flames here were both tame and mutinous, strange, silent beasts that sometimes bit the hand that fed them. Only occasionally, on cold nights when there was nothing but the flames to stave off his loneliness, did he think he heard them calling to him, but they whispered words he didn’t understand.
A strong and bitter book-sickness floods one’s soul. How ignominious to be strapped to this ponderous mass of paper, print and dead man’s sentiment. Would it not be better, finer, braver to leave the rubbish where it lies and walk out into the world a free untrammelled illiterate Superman?
And all was well.
I know why you’re here... This world doesn’t frighten you half as much as the other one. You have nothing and nobody to lose here. Except Fox, and she clearly worries more about you than you do about her. You’ve left all that could frighten you in the other world. But then Will came here and brought it all with him.
After all,” she said, “many people here have little enough patience or understanding for their fellow human beings who are only superficially different than them – so how would it be for little people with blue skins who can fly?
Courage was something John Reckless only ever wished he had. Courage was not a given; it was acquired, earned. You had to take the difficult paths, and John had always picked the easy ones.