Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

by V.E. Schwab

And here is the awful thing about belief. It is a current, like compulsion. Hard to forge when it goes against your will, but easy enough when it carries you the way you want to go.

“Once there was a girl afraid of growing up,” she says, her pencil still scratching at the page. “When she was a child, she was a giant, free and large and boundless. But growing up, she knew, meant becoming small, small enough to fit in a man’s open hand. No longer a person at all, but a trophy, a trinket.”

“But what good is a soul, really?” she muses, as if it’s the first time she’s stopped to wonder. As if it’s not the question that plagued her that first night, that still plagues her after all these years. “It lives in the mind. A piece you cannot see or touch. A prize you are told to shield for a time you cannot know. Easy enough to part with something so abstract when the alternative is freedom. When the promise is love.”