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As if you couldn’t like one place and want to see another.
and there will be a moment, as brief as a yawn, when she won’t know where she is, and her heart will quicken—first with fear, and then with something else. Something she does not have the words for yet.
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.
Jacques was tall, but dull as dirt.
She lies awake and imagines him beside her, his long fingers tracing absent patterns on her skin.
She will grow out of it, her parents say—but instead, Adeline feels herself growing in, holding tighter
The world should be getting larger. Instead, she feels it shrinking, tightening like chains around her limbs as the flat lines of her own body begin to curve out against
Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.
attraction can look an awful lot like recognition in the wrong light.
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.
If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?
and thinks, not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, how much simpler it would be to be a man, how easily they move through the world, and at such little cost.
“I see someone who cares,” she says slowly. “Perhaps too much. Who feels too much. I see someone lost, and hungry. The kind of person who feels like they’re wasting away in a world full of food, because they can’t decide what they want.”
“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
This is what she loves about a city like New York. It is so full of hidden chambers, infinite doors leading into infinite rooms, and if you have the time, you can find so many of them. Some she’s found by accident, others in the course of this or that adventure. She keeps them tucked away, like slips of paper between the pages of her book.
So much of life becomes routine, but food is like music, like art, replete with the promise of something new.
They are the best people in his life, the ones who hold him together, or at least, who keep him from falling apart. But right now, there are too many cracks. Right now, there is a chasm between their words and his ears, their hands and his skin.
There is the awkward silence that fills the space between people who don’t know what to say. And the taut silence that falls over those who do, but don’t know where or how to start.
deserve someone who loves you as you are. The good and the bad and the maddening.”
“But that’s the thing, Henry, you haven’t been you. You waste so much time on people who don’t deserve you. People who don’t know you, because you don’t let them know you.”
It feels good to be the user instead of the used. To be the one who gets instead of the one who loses. It feels good. It shouldn’t, he knows, but it does.
He likes her. And sure, he also likes that she likes him (the him that she sees)
You are more than enough, because you are not real.
They look at you and see whatever they want … Because they don’t see you at all.
He is so tired of hurting, so tired of being hurt.
“You want me as a prize,” she says. “You want me as a meal, or a glass of wine. Just another thing to be consumed.”
She missed him the way someone might miss the sun in winter, though they still dread its
Love is hungry. Love is selfish.” “You are thinking of possession.” He shrugs. “Are they so different? I have seen what humans do to things they love.”
“You see only flaws and faults, weaknesses to be exploited. But humans are messy, Luc. That is the wonder of them. They live and love and make mistakes, and they feel so much. And maybe—maybe I am no longer one of them.”
