Promise me you’ll never stop dreaming.
Just ask how I’m feeling, I want to say. Just ask and I may tell you. But no one does.
Girls under the age of fourteen are the most frightening creatures I have ever come across. – Jonah Griggs.
Do you love me?’ he asked instead. ‘Because if you don’t, I’d wait until you did. I’d wait weeks and months and years.
This is what I know. I look like my father. My father disappeared when he was seventeen years old. Hannah once told me that there is something unnatural about being older than your father ever got to be. When you can say that at the age of seventeen, it’s a different kind of devastating.
She asked me what type of contraceptive I use. Underwear. Keeping it on prevents pregnancy.
When I grow, I’m going to be my mother.
Oh God, Frankie, I breathe in rhythm with that man. You think that’s not my flesh and blood after all these years?
In a kinder world,” he whispered, “one I promise you I’ve seen, men and women flirt and dance and love with only the fear of what it would mean without the other in their lives.
You just have to belong. Long to be.
See, I remember love. That’s what people don’t understand.
Then he holds her and for a moment I hear total silence; that totally silent part of a cry that announces that the most horrible grief is going to follow. And it does, and he’s muffling it, but I can hear and I want someone to come over and jab her with a sedative because its pitch pierces my soul.
Sometimes Webb believed that he would never experience a better feeling than when he was looking at her, would never see anything or anybody bursting with more life and spirit. Sometimes he felt he needed to inhale it and place it in a storage area in his soul. Just in case.
Because people with that much spirit frighten the hell out of me. They make me want to be a better person when I know it’s not possible.
You don’t die. You just... get really angry and then after you’re angry you hurt a lot and then the best thing is that one day you remember something she said or did and you laugh instead of crying.
Land?? Froi whispered. ‘You’re giving them land? I’m not worth the valley.’ ‘You’re worth a kingdom,’ Finnikin said, turning back to the crowd.
I think we’re made up of all these different pieces and every time someone goes, you’re left with less of yourself.
Do you want to hang out? At your place or something?” Hanging out with Jimmy Hailler will mean that I have to say hello to him every day. I’m not ready to say hello to him every day. Too much commitment. It’s bad enough that I’m sharing chocolate brownies swith him. I shake my head. “Not today.
He hesitated, remembering something Finnikin had said to him on their journey. That somehow, even in the worst of times, the tiniest fragments of good survive. It was the grip in which one held those fragments that counted.
Phaedra shook her head. “If your people mean no offense, they should not speak their thoughts out loud in front of their children, Tesadora. Because it will be their children who come to slaughter us one day, all because of careless words passed down by their elders who meant no harm.