You must remember, my dear lady, the most important rule of any successful illusion: First, the people must want to believe in it.
There is no greater power on this earth than story.” Will paced the length of the room. “People think boundaries and borders build nations. Nonsense – words. Stories. Myths. Lies. Promises. History.
But she wasn’t sure she wanted the responsibility of loving anyone right now. The truth was, she was afraid that when she fell hard for a boy, she’d lose herself along the way. She’d seen it happen to lots of girls. They’d go from drinking gin, driving fast card and boldly shimmering in speakeasys, to these passive creatures, who couldn’t make a move without asking their beaus if it would be okay. Evie had no intention of fading behind any man.
When does belief become justification? When does right become rationale and crusade become crime?
That was the trouble with letting people in – once you’d taken off the armor, it was hard to put it back on.
Aww, Sheba. So you’re working for Evie. Honestly, who isn’t working for himself in this meshuga world? Some people just hide it better than others.
Today is a hard day.” Sometimes, there are hard days. Days stretched so tight with pain that they seem as if they can allow no room for hope.
There is no meaning but what we assign. We create our own reality. I can live with that.
Just because you loved somebody with your entire soul didn’t mean they wouldn’t break your heart. And just because somebody loved you didn’t mean they’d be able to stop themselves from hurting you to get what they wanted.
Besides, I’m in the theater, darlin’. I meet an awful lot of strange people. It’s an occupational hazard.
Bloody clothing is often a clue that something has gone awry.
I saw things in that war that a man shouldn’t ever have see. Things that make you forget we’re human and not just a bunch of beasts crawling out of the sludge somewhere. And the damnedest part of it all is, I couldn’t for the life of me remember what we were fighting for in the first place.
All children are demons,” Evie said, breathing heavily. “This is precisely why I always refuse to babysit.
Trust me: If God exists, he’ll know I’m faking it.
When people talked about “family” as something special, a place where you belonged, a dull anger nipped at Henry, a feeling that he’d been cheated of this basic comfort.
Mabel’s parents had said that it was bigotry dressed up to look like science.
It had been a thudding bore of a day; rain had kept Evie inside at the museum, where she amused herself by rearranging the books on one shelf according to a taxonomy only she understood.
Maybe he would kill one of them for fun. Maybe not. Mood was everything.
I’m tired of everyone deciding what’s for my own good!
See, that’s your generation all over-you muck up everything and then expect us to fix your messes.
You know who’s getting hurt? Workers. Poor people. Immigrants. Every day. It’s a rigged game, Evie. The people at the top say they believe in the people at the bottom until those people try to climb up. And then the people at the top step on the hands of the climbing people they claim to believe in and cast them down the ladder.