You can’t handle the pain and anger inside you? Welcome to the club. You’re so much more than that, though. Maybe you messed up. You’ll mess up again. But you’re doing the best you can, and that’s not nothing, you know?
The darkness isn’t going anywhere. But there’s a difference between walking through it and becoming it. It doesn’t control you. You got more of it than you should? Good. Use it. Use it all.
Radu had practiced the poem so often he could recite it in his sleep. He had stolen shiny bits from famous Arabic poems, gathering them like a raven to line his own nest. The language was dense and flowery, hyperbolic in the extreme. Murad listened, enraptured, as his reign was likened to the ocean and his posterity a mighty river.
We can’t spend every moment afraid of what’s waiting for us. What’s waiting for us out in the world, or inside ourselves, as I’ve learned.
The dark queen knows darkness, but in the black, the claustrophobic fear of the dreamer snags her, tries to overtake her. She is the darkness, though. She has nothing to fear there. She cannot be trapped.
Tell me everything. Including how that happened.” She nodded toward his scar. “This? Alas, my beautiful face. Is it not tragic?” “You should be grateful. For the first time in your life you have two eyebrows instead of one.” Nicolae threw his head back, laughter roaring through the square. “My little dragon, always finding the bright side of life. Come. We drink.
What would you sacrifice for power?
Everywhere she went, no matter how many people surrounded her, she knew now she was alone. She may as well be alone in a place that was beautiful.
I have tried so hard to escape this, but my path was always leading here. I took every turn I could. I found faith and God. I found a new home and country, even new tongues and a new name. But I cannot escape becoming a Dracul. The cruelty, the willingness to destroy everything else in pursuit of a goal. I know what she would do. I know what I need to do. But I do not want to do it.
I did not repent my distance from God. If I wanted help, I would find it myself.
Did he know everything, too? Were none of her humiliations private?
You will always have to fight for everything. Even when you already have it, you will have to keep fighting to maintain it. You will have to be more ruthless, more brutal, more everything. Any weakness will undo everything you have accomplished. They will see any crack as evidence that they were right that a woman cannot do what you do.
It was not merely sickness of the body that plagued sieges, but sickness of the soul that turned men into monsters.
That is your problem, then. Peace is not to be found in this city, or any city. Not even Mecca. Peace is to be found here.” He pointed to Radu’s heart.
But the mattress was soft and the blankets warm. Thus every small animal is lulled into security.
Though Radu did not like the intense heat of the foundry, he visited as often as he could. And it was a good thing he had come back when he did. Urbana was screaming in Hungarian at several confused workers. Radu jumped in as a translator, though he left out most of what she said. He did not think telling the workers that they were “more useless than the rotting carcasses of a thousand dead dogs” would help morale.
I get that you’re scared and that you’ve been hurt. But doing what is easy and safe is no way to live, and a life without passion and love is so far beneath what you deserve.′ His words hit me in the gut and my head spins. He’s right. I’ve been choosing alone because it’s safe and easy. It doesn’t mean that I’m stronger or smarter than everyone else. Just that I’m... scared. I’m letting all of the hurt I’ve had over the last few years keep me from moving forward.
Death is never allowed to touch you.
But hands painted red are hands that do what needs to be done.
Jack fell to his knees on the bench, his eyes rolling back in ecstasy a he clutched both hands to his heart. “Oh, heavens above, to have seen such beauty with my own eyes! It’s more than I ever hoped for. But how can I live now, knowing that you’re not mine? Please.” He crawled forward to the edge of the bench. “Marry me. Nay, marriage will cost is precious moments together. Let us make sweet, passionate love right here. Let me beat your children.