Boredom is a terrible affliction of the soulless.
An idea fell like a seed and over the next weeks it went on growing like a fig vine lush and conquering twining round her old beliefs and covering them in new growth until they were as invisible as a tiger in a thicket and just as deadly.
He was right. It made no sense at all, but the feeling flooded through Karou, and whatever it was, it was as sweet as a patch of sun on a glossy floor and, like a cat, she just wanted to curl up in it.
He wanted to tell her that everything he had done he had done because he was broken, because watching her die had destroyed him, but there was no way to say it that didn’t sound like he was trying to pin the blame outside himself.
Because hope comes from in you, and wishes are just magic.
Humanity, perhaps, that quality of benevolence that humans have, without irony, named after themselves.
Zuzana arched an eyebrow. She was a master of the eyebrow arch, and Karou envied her for it. Her own eyebrows did not function independently of each other, which handicapped her expressions of suspicion and disdain.
This is the story of the curse and the kiss, the demon and the girl. It’s a love story with dancing and death in it, and singing and souls and shadows reeled out on kite strings.
No, tiny violent one.
Alas. I am not an option.
Creamy and leggy, with long azure hair and the eyes of a silent-movie star, she moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx.
Then there were things – epic, terrible things – that he didn’t tell her but skirted around, like caressing the edges of a wound, hesitant, testing for pain.
Love makes a person do strange things.
The worst moment of one’s life could be seared into the memory, brighter than any joy.
Once upon a time, there were two moons, who were sisters. Nitid was the goddess of tears and life, and the sky was hers. No one worshipped Ellai but secret lovers.
My tiny scary friend is coming.
It was sadness, lostness, and the worst thing about it was the way it seemed like a default – like it was there all the time, and all her other expressions were just an array of masks she used to cover it up.
She was a girl and she was a queen and back in the mists she was a woman who had seized the moon from the sky and drunk its light so that she would never die. And she never had.
Oh, gross. Your stomach is full of butterfly barf!
A man once said, ‘All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.’ Mark Twain, you know. He had a fine mustache. Men of wisdom so often do.