And there’s no better way to thaw a face, as it turns out, than with another face.
Around Mik, my powers desert me. I lose basic motor function, like my brain focuses all neural activity on my lips and shifts into kiss preparedness mode way too early, to the detriment of things like speech, and walking.
Thank you, but we respectfully decline your overture, being more enjoyably occupied at present.
A thousand things might have stopped me from being here right now, but instead, a thousand things brought me here.
What a lovely display of personhood. He’s like a good book cover that grabs your gaze. Read me. I’m fun but smart. You won’t be able to put me down.
The goblins want girls who dream so hard about being pretty their yearning leaves a palpable trail, a scent goblins can follow like sharks on a soft bloom of blood. The girls with hungry eyes who pray each night to wake up as someone else. Urgent, unkissed, wishful girls. Like Kizzy.
It was impossible, of course. But when did that ever stop any dreamer from dreaming.
I think you’re a fairy tale. I think you’re magical, and brave, and exquisite. And I hope you’ll let me be in your story.
I turned my nightmares into fireflies and caught them in a jar.
He read while he walked. He read while he ate. The other librarians suspected he somehow read while he slept, or perhaps didn’t sleep at all.
And that’s how you go on. You lay laughter over the dark parts. The more dark parts, the more you have to laugh. With defiance, with abandon, with hysteria, any way you can.
Without his books, his room felt like a body with its hearts cut out.
Life won’t just happen to you boy, he said. You have to happen to it.
Once upon a time there was a silence that dreamed of becoming a song, and then I found you, and now everything is music.
The library knows its own mind,” old Master Hyrrokkin told him, leading him back up the secret stairs. “When it steals a boy, we let it keep him.
The dream chooses the dreamer, not the other way around.
There was a man who loved the moon, but whenever he tried to embrace her, she broke into a thousand pieces and left him drenched, with empty arms.
Like nightmares, dreams were insidious things, and didn’t like being locked away.
He looked him right in the eyes and saw a man who was great and good and human, who had done extraordinary things and terrible things and been broken and reassembled as a shell, only then to do the bravest thing of all: He had kept on living, though there are easier paths to take.
Sometimes a moment is so remarkable that it carves out a space in time and spins there, while the world rushes on around it. This was one such.