More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Apparently, people do strange things when they’re scared of dying, and one of them is hoarding toilet paper.
But not everyone has dreams. Some people just are, the way that trees and rocks and rivers are just there without a reason, the rest of the world moving around them.
When you’re drowning and someone grabs your hand, you don’t ask them where they’re taking you.
It’s strange how hate and love can so quietly exist at the same time. They are moon phases, one silently growing until one day all that’s left is darkness.
The end of the world began at a wet market in Wuhan, they say, with a sick bat. Cora has never once eaten a bat, but it has somehow become common knowledge that Chinese people eat bats just to start plagues.
But everything sloughs off Cora like dead skin because she is not the kind of person who creates things, who makes a mark on the world. She is an echo, quieter and quieter until she’s nothing at all.
Bodies melt in the summer like cheese in a microwave, and a heat wave is coming next week.
a bookshelf full of books that Cora plans to read one day—books that will make her smarter or better-adjusted or more worldly.
the first day of Zhongyuan Jie, the hungry ghost festival. Auntie Zeng says it’s when all the ghosts take a vacation from hell to visit earth for a month.
“Violent deaths leave unsettled ghosts,”
A GUIDE TO GHOST MONTH AND OTHER UNFORTUNATE REALITIES THAT AMERICAN GIRLS LIKE TO IGNORE
Fear is born in the after, when the world peels back its skin and shows you its raw, pulsing innards, when it forces you to remember its name. Anyone who has seen the face of fear knows you should damn well be afraid.
Of course nothing adds up, your mind is a labyrinth and you are lost inside.
if you kill someone, you should want it more than anything you’ve ever wanted before. It shouldn’t be easy.
Drinking makes the world cloudy, makes her bones soft and blood heavy like treacle, her mind one foot in a dream. It feels like being buried under a great invisible weight, and Cora likes it, wishes she were always so calm,
I burned through so many lives in video games, died so many times. No one would ever make a game where you only have one chance. But that’s all any of us get.
