Kylie Lee Baker > Quotes

“Many people think that death is the end. The ending of pain, of hate, of love. But these things are not so easy to erase. Any kind of wanting leaves a scar. The living are good at forgetting, the years smoothing out memories until all the days of their lives are nothing but rolling planes of sameness. But in Hell, it is always just yesterday that everything was lost. The dead do not forget.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“Closing your eyes doesn’t stop monsters from devouring you.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“But not everyone has dreams. Some people just are, the way that trees and rocks and rivers are just there without a reason, the rest of the world moving around them.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“Maybe she wants someone to teach her how to be a human the correct way, the way she never learned. Someone to wake her up and tell her what to eat, what to dream about, what to cry about, who to pray to. Because Cora somehow feels that every choice she’s made has been wrong, that every choice she will ever make will lead her deeper and deeper into a life that feels like a dark, airless box, and when she peers through the slats in the wood she’ll see the pale light of who she might have been, so bright that it blinds her.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“When you’re drowning and someone grabs your hand, you don’t ask them where they’re taking you.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater

“A secret part of Cora likes the end of the world because it makes her strangeness feel quieter.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“Cora thinks about the Girl with a Pearl Earring, and the Mona Lisa, and all the beautiful women immortalized in oil paint, and wonders if they said cruel things too, if their words had mattered at all or just the roundness of their eyes and softness of their cheeks, if beautiful people are allowed to break your heart and get away with it.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“There's something peaceful about your worst fear coming true.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“Cora Zeng does not get angry because anger always melts through her fingers until it is a pool of anguish under her feet. There is not enough oxygen inside Cora to keep anger burning. No matter how hard she tries, she can only wield her sharpest thoughts against her own f lesh. She knows, on some level, that most of the problems in her life are her own fault in one way or another. Anger is just one of those thoughts that can never quite sink its teeth into her—she is not solid enough, and its jaws close around nothing at all.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“There are thousands of gods that open thousands of doors to anyone who knocks. It’s about deciding which doors you want to open.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“Any kind of wanting leaves a scar.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“But maybe she wants this monster to have teeth, wants it to be some intangible, hungry darkness that can swallow all her rage like a black hole. She doesn’t want him to have a name, a job, a wife that he holds with the same hands he uses to gut Asian girls like fish. The thought sickens her, the idea that the kind of person who carves people like her open could smile at other people. That he could be loved by other people. Because what does that make Delilah and Yuxi and Zihan and Ai and Officer Wang? Subhuman, bat eaters, garbage to be taken out, people who don’t deserve his humanness. Cora wants him to be a formless ephemeral ball of pure evil, but she knows that he’s not. And she doesn’t care about his redeeming traits but she knows that other people will, that the newspapers will highlight his accomplishments, that the courts will talk about him being a good father or diligent worker or a thousand other things he did that matter infinitely less than what he took from Cora.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“I wouldn't give her my story to add to her collection, because it wasn't over yet”
― Kylie Lee Baker, The Keeper of Night

“It’s strange how hate and love can so quietly exist at the same time. They are moon phases, one silently growing until one day all that’s left is darkness.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“Everything I saw was a story that had been stolen from me”
― Kylie Lee Baker, The Keeper of Night

“But now, Cora knows she’s not dying. Dying doesn’t hurt this much. Dying means there’s an endpoint to the pain.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“Your ducks weren't rude to me. I don't want to eat them."

"I do." Yufei whispered...”
― Kylie Lee Baker, The Scarlet Alchemist

“Cora knows that the face of fear is not an abstract what-if. Fear is born in the after, when the world peels back its skin and shows you its raw, pulsing innards, when it forces you to remember its name.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“Think about this. Abolishing gold will cost you the rich. Marrying me could cost you the poor as well." "Zilan," he said, taking my other hand. "I don't care if it costs me the world.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, The Scarlet Alchemist

“I was nothing but Death that bled from every organ and anger so vicious that it could tear the sky to shreds, drain the oceans dry, and crack the universe in two.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, The Keeper of Night

“I am offended,"" he said, making a show of crossing his arms and turning away. ""I may forgive you if you kiss me, though.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, The Scarlet Alchemist

“If you want someone dead, you should have to sink your fingers into their eyes, feel their trachea collapse under your hands, let them scratch your arms and pull your hair and cry and beg. Because if you kill someone, you should want it more than anything you’ve ever wanted before. It shouldn’t be easy.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“When you have enough souls in one place, suffering is inevitable”
― Kylie Lee Baker, The Keeper of Night

“This sharp fire feels much better than God’s forgiveness ever could.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“I am the night that birthed the world. I am the bones of all the planets. I am silence. I am the end.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, The Scarlet Alchemist

“Why am I the only one with no say in who I am?”
― Kylie Lee Baker, The Keeper of Night

“No one would ever make a game where you only have one chance. But that’s all any of us get. And the worst part is I know I’m losing.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“Every day that the wealth gap yawned wider, I began to realize that evil was not found in the demons or spirits we could ward away with fragrant flowers, but in the men who thought that everything on earth could be bought.”
― Kylie Lee Baker , The Scarlet Alchemist

“Cora wonders at what point a person stops being one singular person and becomes a collection of parts.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

“On the fifteenth day of the seventh month, a door opens. The starving dead crawl out, mouths full of dust, and reach for a home that has already forgotten them. Their stomachs scream for food, but their tongues are heavy and dry, their necks as thin as needles. They lick the tears of the living from the dirt, and sometimes, it is enough to sate them. But sometimes, the hunger only yawns wider.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng