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What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind?
March is such a fickle month. It is the seam between winter and spring—though seam suggests an even hem, and March is more like a rough line of stitches sewn by an unsteady hand, swinging wildly between January gusts and June greens. You don’t know what you’ll find, until you step outside.
“The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle, unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm.
No, 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.
Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.
Sees the sadness in his anger, the guardedness of grief.
A secret kept. A record made. The first mark she left upon the world, long before she knew the truth, that ideas are so much wilder than memories, that they long and look for ways of taking root.
Henry would rather be a storykeeper than a storyteller.
Aut viam invenium aut faciam,
To find a way, or make your own.
Blink and half your life is gone. I do not want to die as I’ve lived. Born and buried in the same ten-meter plot.
“Small places make for small lives. And some people are fine with that. They like knowing where to put their feet. But if you only walk in other people’s steps, you cannot make your own way. You cannot leave a mark.”
he’s always stayed away from the harder stuff, out of fear—not the fear that something would go wrong. Just the opposite: the fear it would feel right. The fear of the slip, the slide, of knowing he wouldn’t be strong enough to stop. It’s never been the high he craved, anyway, not exactly. It’s just the quiet. That happy side effect.
Eighteen is old enough to vote, twenty-one is old enough to drink, but thirty is old enough to make decisions.”
That time always ends a second before you’re ready. That life is the minutes you want minus one.
