The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

by V.E. Schwab

Adeline has decided she would rather be a tree, like Estele. If she must grow roots, she would rather be left to flourish wild instead of pruned, would rather stand alone, allowed to grow beneath the open sky. Better that than firewood, cut down just to burn in someone else’s hearth.

This is a beautiful metaphor for beauty

There is a rhythm to moving through the world alone. You discover what you can and cannot live without, the simple necessities and small joys that define a life.

It is like a gap between stones, this village, just wide enough for things to get lost. The kind of place where time slips and blurs, where a month, a year, a life can go missing. Where everyone is born and buried in the same ten-meter plot.

How foolish to think it would stay the same, when everything else has changed. When she has changed, grown from a girl into a woman, and then into this—a phantom, a ghost.

with cities like Paris, London, Chicago, New York, she doesn’t have to pace herself, doesn’t have to take small bites to make the newness last. A city she can consume as hungrily as she likes, devour it every day and never run out of things to eat.

There is a freedom, after all, in being forgotten.

“I call it weakness. To only walk in circles when you could make new roads.”

Whew. A quote.

“Semantics may seem small, Adeline, but the power of a deal is in its wording.

Greatness requires sacrifice.

She missed him the way someone might miss the sun in winter, though they still dread its heat.

“It’s my own name I ache for, not your lips.”

They teach you growing up that you are only one thing at a time—angry, lonely, content—but he’s never found that to be true. He is a dozen things at once. He is lost and scared and grateful, he is sorry and happy and afraid.