I guess it’s the same way trees grow around the very vines that are killing them, so they’re strangled and sustained all at once. After a long time, even pain can be a comfort.
How convenient if you could see what was wrong with people right away, if they wore their sicknesses and crimes on their skin like tattoos.
The problem with fairy tales isn’t that they don’t exist. It’s that they do exist, but only for some people.
It’s for the best. But no matter how many times I repeat it, the strange, hollow feeling in my stomach doesn’t go away. And ridiculous as it is, I can’t shake the persistent, needling feeling that I’ve forgotten something, or missed something, or lost something forever.
Maybe you can afford to wait. Maybe for you there’s a tomorrow. Maybe for you there’s one thousand tomorrows, or three thousand, or ten, so much time you can bathe in it, roll around it, let it slide like coins through you fingers. So much time you can waste it. But for some of us there’s only today. And the truth is, you never really know.
They would face it together, as they were then: turned human by joy, by a belonging that felt just like freedom.
When she was little, she’d liked to pretend that stars were really lights anchoring distant islands, as if she wasn’t looking up but only out across a dark sea. She knew the truth now but still found stars comforting, especially in their sameness. A sky full of burning replicas.
We stay like that for a long time, side by side, holding hands, until the crickets, obeying the same ancient law that pulls the sun from the sky and throws the moon up after it, that strips autumn down to winter and pushes spring up afterward, obeying the law of closure and new beginnings, send their voices up from the silence, and sing.
I’m dead, but I can’t stop living.
He doesn’t love me. He never loved me. All along, he’s loved her.
The gun was just the go-between. It was the loneliness that got me in the end.
Lyra and Caelum: the two replicas with names plucked straight from the stars.
That’s the problem with lies. They aren’t solid. They melt, and seep, and leak into the truth. And sooner or later, everything’s just a muddle.
That was the problem with the outside world, the human world. The whole thing was made up puzzles, of a language she didn’t quite speak.
Words mean different things to different people, at different times, in different places.
Memory is like that, too. We build careful bridges. But they’re weaker than we think.
If you don’t watch out, they’ll grab you. They’ll take you to the underworld and turn you into a bride.
There’s something backward about living in a place so obsessed with the past; it’s like everyone’s given up on the idea of a future.
I learned to swallow words back, hold secrets on my tongue until they dissolved like soap bubbles.
But at the beginning of the night anything’s possible.