The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

by V.E. Schwab

“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.”

“These are the words of a man—Voltaire. But they are also the hands that set the type. The ink that made it readable, the tree that made the paper. All of them matter, though credit goes only to the name on the cover.”

“The worst part of every meal is when it ends.”

Food is one of the best things about being alive. Not just food. Good food. There is a chasm between sustenance and satisfaction, and while she spent the better part of three hundred years eating to stave off the pangs of hunger, she has spent the last fifty delighting in the discovery of flavor. So much of life becomes routine, but food is like music, like art, replete with the promise of something new.

But this is how you walk to the end of the world. This is how you live forever. Here is one day, and here is the next, and the next, and you take what you can, savor every stolen second, cling to every moment, until it’s gone.

She wants to hold the night like a chocolate on her tongue, savor every second before it melts.

Hands are like heads; they always bleed too much.

Easy to stay on the path when the road is straight and the steps are numbered.

Everyone else starts over, they get a blank page, but hers are full of text. People talk about carrying torches for old flames, and it’s not a full fire, but Addie’s hands are full of candles. How is she supposed to set them down, or put them out? She has long run out of air.