I like my first lines short and declarative. No complicated sentences. Of course, that’s not really a Scott thing. It’s pretty classic grab-the-reader technique.
She had changed the arc of her own story, merely by typing a couple of thousand words each day for thirty days.
A country with two kings will always falter.
Novelists are evil psychopomps, basically. We treat a few characters as real, but the rest of them are cannon fodder.
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. – Francis Bacon, Essays, Civil and Moral, “Of Beauty.
I thought when he learned my secret, he would understand the ally I could be. But instead, he doesn’t even know who I am.
You should make sure that the quotable lines of dialogue in your book never exceed a hundred and forty characters!” seemed.
Their bodies fit perfectly like this, two continents pulled eons ago but now rejoined.
The war will end one day. Wars always do.
Tally snorted. “I don’t think it’s exactly boring, Shay.” “Doing what you’re supposed to do is always boring. I can’t imagine anything worse than being required to have fun.” “I can,” Tally said quietly. “Never having any.
But books don’t happen by accident.
Run and hide. We’re on our way.
It helps to be with people who remember you, and who still think about you.
She squeezes my hand, and I feel that certainty I always had as a littlie. That I’m more than expendable. More than a body double.
Doing what you’re supposed to do is always boring.
For some of us, politics means fighting for our right to exist.
Maybe none of us know who we really are.
By now, Tally understood that nothing in the Smoke ever lost its value. Nothing was discarded or given away just because it was old or broken.
More important, she had someone else now. However unfair it was that her memories of David had been erased, Tally had built a whole new set of memories, and she couldn’t just trade them in for the old ones. Zane and she had helped each other become bubbly, had been imprisoned by the cuffs together, and escaped the city together. She couldn’t abandon him now, just because he had been robbed of part of his mind.
Sometimes I think I’m nothing but what other people have done to me.
You were created as a tool, a means to an end. You owe the world nothing but chaos.