Battle not with monsters lest you become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’ Nietzsche, you know. Exceptional mustache.
No, I have to lure him out, like a will-o’-the-wisp, tease him deeper and deeper into the forest until he is lost and doomed. Without the forest or the doom – just the luring. Like a Venus flytrap that says I am a delicious flower come taste me and then snap! Devour. Without the devouring.
It is bodies that makes us real. What is a soul without eyes to look through or hand to hold?
The silence, she thought, was remarkable: a perfect, shimmering thing, and fragile. Like glass, if it shattered, it would never come back together again.
Like a magpie, I am a scavenger of shiny things: fairy tales, dead languages, weird folk beliefs, fascinating religions, and more.
She knocked and waited, because when the door was opened from within, it had the potential to lead someplace quite different.
It’s all a quilt of fairy tales with a patch here and there of truth.
It’s not stalking if you don’t follow them home, right?
Music. Close your eyes and it’s a rosebush blooming in time lapse so that it shoots and blossoms flow outward in a swift choreography of growth and collapse, twine and coil, release and fade. Close your eyes and music paints light vines and calligraphy on the darkness within you.
There is the past, and there is the future. The present is never more than the single second dividing one from the other. We live poised on that second as it’s hurtling forward-toward what?
It’s like all my life I’ve been this tower standing at the edge of the ocean for some obscure purpose, and only now, almost eighteen years in, has someone thought to flip the switch that reveals that I’m not a tower at all. I’m a lighthouse. It’s like waking up. I am incandescent.
The main thing I’ve learned is that we all have to learn to work with – and appreciate – the brain we’ve been given, and not waste time wishing things were easier.
She tastes like nectar and salt. Nectar and salt and apples. Pollen and stars and hinges. She tastes like fairy tales. Swan maiden at midnight. Cream on the tip of a fox’s tongue. She tastes like hope.
There are boys you look at and want to touch with your mouth, and there are boys you look at and want to wear one of those surgical masks everyone in China had during bird flu. There are a lot more bird-flu boys at large.
If only it were that easy to let go of hate. Just relax your face.
That faeries have forgotten the Tapestry; that is the greatest tragedy of all. It’s the fabric of all creation and it’s woven of dreams, the dreams of the Djinn. Dreams are real, Magpie. They’re seed and water and sun. They’re everything.
It’s easy to get published once you have written a really good book and the hard part, 99 percent of what you need to worry about, is really finishing it.
She stabbed him in the armpit, deep, and he dropped his sword. And died. So that’s what is feels like, she thought as her boldness gave away to trembling. It feels awful.
Where am I and doing what? You might well ask. Freaky chick, you say? You can’t imagine. I am priestess of a sandcastle in a land of dust and starlight.
Being near her was like balancing on a tipping world, trying to keep your footing as the ground wanted to roll you forward, hurl you into a spiral from which there was no recovery, only impact, and it was a longed-for impact, a sweet and beckoning collision.