It hadn’t occurred in the physical realm, that much was true. His hand had not touched her hand. But... his mind had touched her mind, and that seemed to him a deeper reality and even greater intimacy.
Again his memory failed to conjure her face. It was like trying to call up a melody while another song played.
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. Sathaz had finally learned that if he climbed into the pool and kept very still, the moon would come to him and let him be near her. Only near, never touching. He couldn’t touch her without shattering her, and so – as Lazlo had told Sarai – he had made peace with the impossible. He took what he could get.
As to having a preference, that was new too. You take what you’re given and you’re grateful for it. Once that message is well and truly ingrained in you, it feels like vainglory to imagine one’s own likes and dislikes could matter to other people.
But the roots of their hate and fear were too deep, and Lazlo saw hints of revulsion as their confusion smeared one feeling into the next.
Everyone else had managed to pick up the tatters and mend them into wearable lives. Why couldn’t he?
Here, captured between covers, was the history of the human imagination, and nothing had ever been more beautiful, or fearsome, or bizarre. Here were spells and curses and myths and legends, and Strange the dreamer had for so long fed his mind on them that if one could wander into it, they would discover a fantasia.
We will fight for our world to the last echo of our souls.
Beautiful and full of monsters?” “All the best stories are.
Remember: The spirit grows sluggish when you neglect the passions.
She’d have to get used to him all over again, taking small sips of his beauty as if it was too hot a drink to swallow all at once.
This was not the frustration one feels at waking from a sweet dream. It was the desolation of having found the place that fits, the one true place, and experiencing the first heady sigh of rightness before being torn away and cast back into random, lonely scatter.
It is a condition of monsters that they do not perceive themselves as such.
There were crinkles at the corners of his eyes, which were merry and asquint with unselfconscious happiness. The change was profound. If he was beautiful when grave-and he was-smiling, he was nothing short of glorious.
She is in love. It is bright within her, like a swallowed star.
Karou was, simply, lovely. 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. Beyond merely pretty, her face was vibrantly alive, her gaze always sparking and luminous, and she had a birdlike way of cocking her head, her lips pressed together while her dark eyes danced, that hinted at secrets and mysteries.
When they had hurried to the train station with their violin cases, they had drawn almost as many stares as they would on any normal day when their hair was to their knees and sheeting behind them like red silk. A poetic fruit-seller had told them once that they looked like dryads, and they did still, only now they looked like dryads who had tired of snagging their hair on brambles and sliced it all off on the edge of a knife.
Once upon a time, chimaera descended by the thousands into a cathedral beneath the earth. And never left.
To take from the universe, you must give.
She wore her ferocity like armor, and it was purely asexual armor. Liraz was untouchable and untouched.