Perhaps there’s another, much larger story behind the printed one, a story that changes just as our own world does. And the letters on the page tell us only as much as we’d see peering through a keyhole. Perhaps the story in the book is just the lid on a pan: It always stays the same, but underneath there’s a whole world that goes on – developing and changing like our own world.
He saw so many emotions mingled on her face: anger disappointment, fear – and defiance. Like her daughter, thought Fenoglio again. So uncompromising, so strong. Women were different, no doubt about it. Men broke so much more quickly. Grief didn’t break women. Instead it wore them down, it hollowed them out, very slowly.
Because by now Elinor had understood this, too: A longing for books was nothing compared with what you could feel for human beings. The books told you about that feeling. The books spoke of love, and it was wonderful to listen to them, but they were no substitute for love itself. They couldn’t kiss her like Meggie, they couldn’t hug her like Resa, they couldn’t laugh like Mortimer. Poor books, poor Elinor.
He felt Death reaching out to him. But all of a sudden there was something else, too: words. Words that relieved the pain, cooled his brow, and spoke of love, nothing but love... It was his daughter’s voice, and the White Women withdrew their pale hands as if they had burned themselves on her love.
Why could she remember nothing but stories of frightened people when Capricorn looked at her? She usually found it so easy to escape somewhere else, to get right inside the minds of people and animals who existed only on paper, so why not now? Because she was afraid. “Because fear kills everything,” Mo had once told her. “Your mind, your heart, your imagination.
Secrets... nothing eats away at love faster.
Once upon a time... There’s a reason all fairy tales begin like this. But the ‘and they lived happily ever after’ at the end? That has to be earned.
From the tower battlements, Dustfinger looked down on a lake as black as night, where the reflection of the castle swam in a sea of stars. The wind passing over his unscarred face was cold from the snow of the surrounding mountains, and Dustfinger relished life as if he were tasting it for the first time. The longing it brought, and the desire. All the bitterness, all the sweetness, even if it was only for a while, never for more than a while, everything gained and lost, lost and found again.
In our choices lie our fate.
For the hundredth time, she closed her eyes so she could see another room in her mind’s eye, one with a curtain full of stars, and a mattress surrounded by books that whispered their stories to her at night. – Pg. 235.
Love didn’t deserve the nice reputation it had.
Power. Like wine when you have it. Like poison when you lose it.
You can’t expect the wolf to turn vegetarian because of one Pup.
She’d been so certain she knew every crevice of his heart, but Jacob was like a country she’d only traveled through halfway.
Love makes cowards of us all.
Courage was not a given; it was acquired, earned.
Odd that your heart didn’t simply stop when it hurt so much.
Yes, Mo would come. Meggie could think of nothing else as Fenoglio led her away with him, his arm around her as if he could really protect her from Capricorn and Basta and all the others. But he couldn’t. Would Mo be able to protect her? Of course not. He mustn’t come, she thought. Please. Perhaps he won’t be able to find his way in again! He mustn’t come. Yet there was nothing she wanted more, nothing in the whole wide world.
Life is so simple when you’re young, though of course that’s not what it feels like to the young.
Love scared him. It was soft. And vulnerable.