Never attempt an alliance without chocolate.
In the thick of play, his daydreams were so vivid that a glimpse of reality would have shocked him.
For what was a person but the sum of all the scraps of their memory and experience: a finite set of components with an infinite array of expressions.
And that’s how you go on. You lay laughter over the dark parts. The more dark parts, the more you have to laugh.
Why not open the door, and open their arms, and close them again around each other? Did the not understand how, in the strange chemistry of human emotion, his suffering and her, mingled together, could... countervail each other?
Her voice would die before she ran out of rage. She could scream a hole in her throat and come unraveled, fall to pieces like moth-chewed silk, and still, from the leftover shreds of her, the little pile of tatters, would pour forth this unending scream.
This was a game that kill could not win – or, if it did, it would be an unbearable win that destroyed the very meaning of winning.
My people understood that time is an ocean, not a river. It doesn’t flow away and pour itself out, done and gone. It simply is – eternal and entire. Mortals might move through it in one direction, but that’s no reflection of its true nature – only of our limitations. Past and future are our own constructs. And as for myths, some are made up, nothing but fantasy. But some myths are true. Some have already been lived. And in the drift of time, eternal and entire, some haven’t.
She was like springtime distilled into a person.
Because if Lazlo thought a dream could not be stolen, he underestimated Thyon Nero.
You don’t know yet what you’re capable of, but I’m willing to bet it’s extraordinary.
There was a word from a myth: sathaz. It was the desire to possess that which can never be yours. It meant senseless, hopeless yearning, the way a gutter child might dream of being king, and it came from the tale of the man who loved the moon.
What was he? Storyteller and secretary and doer of odd jobs, neither Tizerkane nor delegate, just someone along for the dream.
I’ve thought things were impossible before, and so far, none of them actually were.
It’s easy to make people cry. Grief, humiliation, anger – there are countless avenues to tears. It’s easy to make them scream, too. There are so many things to fear.
He didn’t think like other people. He didn’t dismiss magic out of hand, and he didn’t believe that fairy tales were just for children. He knew magic was real, because he’d felt it.
He believed in magic, like a child, and in ghosts, like a peasant. His nose was broken by a falling volume of fairy tales his first day on the job, and that, they said, told you everything you needed to know about strange Lazlo Strange: head in the clouds, world of his own, fairy tales and fancy. That.
The tattered lace of darkness still hung over the city, as if night were a grim bride trudging to the horizon, trailing her shadowy train.
Seventh bearer of the cursed name Akiva.” Here he paused, speculative. “No Misbegotten ever bore that name to manhood before you. Did you know that? Old Byon the steward, he gave it out of spite. Wanted your mother to beg him not to. Any other woman in the harem would have, but not Festival. ‘Scribble whatever you like on your list, old man,’ she told him. ‘My son will not be tangled in your feeble fates.’
Hope was luster, and they had shone with it like twin pearls in an oyster.