All Folked Up (Good Folk: Modern Folktales, #3)

by Penny Reid

“Tina, you seem to think screwdrivers know and respond to the level of testosterone in a person’s body. A screwdriver doesn’t care if I’m a woman or a man, it works just the same.”

“Why do they like their queens so much?” Dave asked the room. “What’s the deal with having a monarchy in modern times? It’s like having a mascot for a country. Why does a country need a mascot? Get yourself a badass animal mascot like a bald eagle. That’s what I say.”

It had taught me to never assume I knew what privileges or troubles a person faced without wearing their apron and baking their banana cakes.

“I like my tea like I like my men,” I said with a little smile, selecting the Earl Grey and pulling out a bag. His expression had been cloudy since leaving the Winstons’, but at my joke he seemed to perk up. “How’s that?” “Noble but gray.” I winked at him.

“Reading their interpretations helped, but for me, the thing that really stood out and something I didn’t see discussed was that if you treat everything like it doesn’t matter—like Lord Henry did, like he persuaded Dorian to do—then nothing matters and life becomes meaningless.”

People who play devil’s advocate but don’t have any beliefs other than in themselves, only play devil’s advocate in order to invalidate the beliefs of others, those people are the most evil and should be cut from your life. They’re destructive, deadweight. But it was also the theme of appearance versus reality that made an impact on me, the lies people tell, both to others and themselves, and how changing one detail in your description or representation of a thing can actually completely change another person’s perception of that thing.”

“When Wilde describes the flowering thorn bush? Obviously, he’s talking about a rose bush. But he calls it a flowering thorn bush. He’s fundamentally changed our perception of that plant by making it all about thorns and minimizing the role of the flower, of the rose, even though the rose is beautiful and the thorn is hurtful. I thought that was so brilliant at the time, and it made me realize and notice how people—manipulative people—used language. What they decide to focus on, what they describe and what they leave out of their description. They use language to change the perspectives and beliefs of those around them.”

Folks with no sense of humor were either wet blankets or psychopaths.

“Obedience isn’t something I value, or want. It makes people small, it narrows their world. Obedience is for God, not for a partner.”

Life hack: You can’t miss something if you have no expectation of it in the first place.

Whatever. Eat a dick, Wendy, and let me be a hypocrite.

“You know I’m not opposed to blackmail, dearest. Not at all. I’m just pointing out that any future progeny will inherit it from both sides of our family trees. Two dominant extortion genes. I couldn’t be happier.”