Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

by V.E. Schwab

To the ones who hunger— for love, for time, or simply to be free

not all sins were boulders, that most in fact were more like pebbles. An unkind thought. A hungry heart. Small weights like greed and envy and want (things that didn’t seem to her like sins at all, but apparently they added up).

But María has known, all her life, that she is not meant for common paths, for humble houses and modest men. If she must walk a woman’s road, then it will take her somewhere new.

And as she did, she told her daughter what it meant to be a wife. Gentle. Loving. Obedient. Words that made María tense.

“You will learn, it is better to bend than to break.” María stared into the hearth. “Why should I be the one who bends?”

(Four inches of metal and glass is as good as a shield, since no one notices a phone, and if they do, they just assume you’re looking at yourself instead of them.)

There is little sense in savoring what isn’t hers.

“One can be alone without feeling lonely,” she muses. “One can feel lonely without being alone.”

Because that is the power of big sisters, the urge to take anything they offer.

“It’s just you,” she says. “And whatever’s in you is in me. We’re made of the same stuff.”

Alice gets it now. Why her sister was always breaking things. Because rage shatters out, not in.

Love. As terrible and bottomless as hunger. She wonders what it’s like.

she’s always felt the same way about day and night. Like they’re two entirely separate worlds. A different smell, a different taste, a different energy.

Never walk alone at night, they tell you, if you’re a girl. And it isn’t fair. Because the night is when the world is quiet. The night is when the air is clear.

As if Alice didn’t come into this world with both eyes focused on her sister.

You are the kind of bloom that thrives in any soil.

As if love and horror could not go hand in hand.

“The world will try to make you small. It will tell you to be modest, and meek. But the world is wrong. You should get to feel and love and live as boldly as you want.”

“Death comes, and sometimes it is kind, and often it is cruel, and very rarely it is welcome. But it comes, all the same.”

a soul is what makes the sun feel warm against your skin, what gives food taste, what makes you feel full.