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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.
There was no danger in it, no reproach, not when she was young. All girls are prone to dreaming. She will grow out of it, her parents say—but instead, Adeline feels herself growing in, holding tighter to the stubborn hope of something more.
Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget.
Sees the sadness in his anger, the guardedness of grief.
Being trapped, buried alive, these are the things that scare you when you cannot die.
My name is Adeline LaRue, she tells herself. My father taught me how to be a dreamer, and my mother taught me how to be a wife, and Estele taught me how to speak to gods.
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.
Perhaps an enemy’s company is still better than none.
That is how memories are for her, past rising into present, a palimpsest held up to the light.
Addie is not a fool. Whatever this is, she knows it will not last. She has lived too long to think it chance, been cursed too long to think it fate.
So much of life becomes routine, but food is like music, like art, replete with the promise of something new.
Ideas are wilder than memories.
He is full of roots, while she has only branches.
Blink and you’re twenty-eight, and everyone else is now a mile down the road, and you’re still trying to find it, and the irony is hardly lost on you that in wanting to live, to learn, to find yourself, you’ve gotten lost.
It feels good to be the user instead of the used.
Homesick—Henry knows that one is supposed to mean sick for home, not from it, but it still feels right.
Choosing a class became choosing a discipline, and choosing a discipline became choosing a career, and choosing a career became choosing a life, and how was anyone supposed to do that, when you only had one?
She has gone so long without roots, she doesn’t know how to grow them anymore.
They’ve been lucky, so lucky, but the trouble with luck is that it always ends.
It is harder to manage, when the impossible is so obvious. Your mind can’t make sense of it, so you try again and again and again, convinced that this time, it will be different. This, she knows, is how you go mad.
Eighteen is old enough to vote, twenty-one is old enough to drink, but thirty is old enough to make decisions.”
“Because time is cruel to all, and crueler still to artists. Because vision weakens, and voices wither, and talent fades.”
Not for a lifetime—for a single year.
“It is because I love you that I won’t. Love is hungry. Love is selfish.”
“This is need. And need is painful but patient.
