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Book characters were dangerously attractive in the safest way. You didn’t even know what they looked like, but you knew you liked it.
Alice was a literary romantic, falling in love with the potential of every story she met.
Reading a book was like meeting someone for the first time. You don’t know if you will love them or hate them enough to learn every detail, or skim the surface never to know their depths.
In the strange, fascinating world of these books, with its glorious horror of a hero, pain meant something.
The idea of deserving someone was wrong-headed. You couldn’t win women on points. Alice must be thinking of video games.
Sorry to the side of good. Evil’s just sexier.”
She refused to have another argument about the Emperor being problematic. Clearly, the Emperor was problematic. When you murdered half the people you met, you had a problem. Stories lived on problems. There was a reason Star Wars wasn’t Star Peace.
Villainous characters had epic highs, epic lows, and epic loves. The Emperor loved like an apocalypse.
In real life, people let you go. That was why people longed for the love from stories, love that felt more real than real love.
Is truth stone, or is it water? If enough people walk through a world in their imaginations, a path forms. What’s reality, except something that really affects us? If enough people believe in something, doesn’t it become real?”
Finding a favourite character was discovering a soul made of words that spoke to your own.
They purged through impossible tragedy until their hearts were clean.
At the bottom were peasants, who grew food and carried away garbage. Society would collapse without them, so they were treated horribly.
A long-ago teacher had told Rae stories were created by villains. Their desires and evil deeds ignited the plot, while the hero only wanted to stop them. At least to begin with, villains were in charge.
“I’m a treacherous, power-hungry bitch, and honestly? It feels amazing. Don’t listen to stories encouraging you to be good, telling you to shine in a filthy world and patiently endure suffering. Screw suffering. It’s too hard to be good. Do the easy thing. Do the evil thing. Grasp whatever you desire in your greedy bloodstained hands.”
An anti-hero was just a villain with good PR. The Emperor might sympathize with Rae. She’d always sympathized with him.
Oh no, whatever you do, don’t accuse me of being cool and sexy!
“Have you never considered art grants us the impossible? Art opens a door into someone else’s imagination and lets us walk through. Art is the dreamed-of escape. Art lets the dead speak and the living laugh. Art takes you away from pain when no medicine can save you. Art is the first and last word. Art is the final consolation.”
No blade, no beloved, no blood spilled by my hands. I am for the words on the page. I am for the goddess.
Is he a real person too?!?! ... Are they all!!!????
“I understand hiring protection in this place, my lady, but I must warn you. Of all the horrors lurking in the Cauldron, the Villain is the worst.”
“Nobody ever asked me what I like before. People don’t want to play with me, but board games and puzzles look fun. I enjoy thinking things out.”
Sociopaths don’t have strong emotions about other people, so people and their feelings never become real to them.”
What would you be, if you weren’t well rounded but the broken pieces of a character made to be used and tossed aside?
Have you ever had the sense – someone was important, even though they weren’t? That you wanted to belong to them, and have them not throw you away?”
“Have I ever… loved someone?”
“Yes,”
“Strange, isn’t it?”
You could dismiss someone with ‘all he cares about is money’, never acknowledging what money might mean. Not a useless luxury but your future, the life of someone you loved, or the last thing you could ever do for them.
“I need her. Being someone’s sister is the one thing I haven’t failed at. She was always lovely and easy to hurt. I hurt her sometimes, I resented her sometimes, but I planned to fight her enemies my whole life. When we were young, we told each other stories. When I got sick, I was scared to sleep, in case I never woke up. I could only sleep when I told myself if I died, she’d tell her kids stories about me. I wouldn’t be anything but a story then, but that’s better than being nothing at all. Nobody lives forever, but a story can. Stories are how I survive. When I’m fighting to live, I think
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His body was a shield between her and this world. “Remember,” he murmured. “Other people aren’t real.”
