How quickly the mighty fall.
You may be able to look beyond the reality of our situation and imagine some other outcome, but all I ever saw, all I ever see, is a reminder that our lives aren’t our own.
Feeling like you’re enough has nothing to do with actually being enough – you choose whether or not you are.
Don’t let fear take hold of you – fear is a seed that, once planted, never stops growing.
If stubborness were all that was needed to be a good queen, I’d rule the world.
I’m at the center of this, a weird possessive feud between the Winter king and the Cordellan prince.
Books in towering stacks lean against the fireplace and on small end tables, and crowd the bookshelves so tightly I fear the entire structure will burst in an explosion of paper and dust. They’re the large books too, great archaic things that look so old, so fragile, that I worry I might disintegrate them just by breathing too hard.
You are not what you’ve done. Who you are right now, this moment, is who you choose to be.
That, I think, i a truer mark of belonging somewhere – being willing to do anything, everything, that needs to be done, regardless of what I want.
I wanted to be a soldier. Someone who would earn standing in Winter. Someone Sir would look at with pride. Someone Mather would look at and –.
No apologies. No matter what happens, I will never, not in a thousand tragic outcomes, ever regret loving you.
Horrible things have happened to us, are still happening to us, will happen every day for the rest of our lives, probably. What defines us is not our ability to never let them break us – what defines us is not letting them own us.
He stares into the sky, his eyes absent and empty, an expression that branded its horrible meaning into my mind long, long ago. A candle without a spark, a sky without a sun, the look people get when they cease to be people, start being bodies.
It is amazing what you can hide when no one knows what to look for.
Soon he’ll know the blizzard started with me.
You’ll only regret the time it took you to make the decision.
Horrible things don’t happen in crowded places; they happen in the hollows of the world, where it’s just a victim and an attacker and no one to hear any screams. “Hang.
The world is changing. We cannot deal with the problem as we have in the past, or we will always end up where we started.
It’s so cold that foreigners have to wrap in layers of fur to walk from building to building, while our natural Winterian blood keeps us warm even in the worst conditions. And snow is everywhere, always, so much that the grass beneath it is white from lack of sun. An entire kingdom wrapped in an orb of eternal winter.
So tired of Noam and Herod and Sir and Angra and all these arrogant, puppet-master men who hold all the strings and refuse to give them up.