Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

by V.E. Schwab

Only later did her mother say that 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).

“Careful. In nature, beauty is a warning. The pretty ones are often poisonous.”

Sabine notes the date, and casually reveals that she is twenty, only to add that she has been that age three hundred years. Three hundred years. The mind boggles at the size of such a life, the scope, the scale. Charlotte gasps, and Sabine crooks a brow. “What is it?” “Think of all the books that you could have read!”