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Simini was small and soft, and so shy that coming out of her shell wasn’t even on the menu. If you wanted to talk to Simini, you had to climb inside her shell with her.
Elspeth says it’s a laugh, getting older. But oh, Miranda knows, Elspeth doesn’t mean it.
Oh newfound land.
This was where music had always existed for me. Inside a dark bathroom.
I understood my life was meaningless, and this knowledge freed me up to accomplish absolutely anything.
“Would you rather be great at something you like, or just okay at something you love?”
A corny Christmas song that didn’t even seem that corny. “Wanna stop and listen for a minute?” Haley asked. “It’ll feel more like Christmas.”
Most things about the night are a blur, as most magical things are.
The thing about snow is, it’s very quiet. The air is hushed. It’s like church. It’s reverential.
Asheville loved anything organic. It was that type of town.
Most non-Asian-Americans were terrible guessers. They’d say Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese before Chinese. As if they were afraid “Chinese” was a stereotype, and they’d get in trouble for suggesting it. As if China weren’t the most populous country in the world.
Marigold’s chest tightened like a Victorian corset.
He says presents aren’t important, but I think they are—not because of how much they cost, but for the opportunity they provide to say I understand you.
Our conversation went something like this: Him: “Santa’s other name is Saint Nick.” Me: “Saint Nick Claus?” Him: “No. Just Saint Nick. For Saint Nicholas.” Me: “But aren’t all saints dead? Like, if Santa Claus is a saint, doesn’t that mean he’s dead?” I could see the truth hitting him. Then he burst into tears.
I remember his definition of magic vividly: “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with will.”
“I put vodka in it. It wakes up the champagne.”
He was like a painting you wanted to burn so you could finally stop staring at it.
With dawn of the new year on the horizon, I resolved to exert my will on the world.
Of all the things and people she missed lately, it was odd to find herself at the top of the list.
‘Poetry isn’t math’
Girls like that and guys like me don’t mix. Except when there’s a pending court order.
“I’m of the opinion,” she said, tucking her arm around mine, “that if you let a single life event define you, then all you need to change things—if you want them to change—is another.”
we’re all just punching our time cards until we die.
“I’m pretty sure you spice your cookies with something illegal.” “Cinnamon is not a controlled substance.” “That should be the title of your memoir.”
“I think the anticipation is more fun than anything else. I kind of lost that. The idea that something—food, traditions, an arbitrary date on the calendar—can be special because we decide it should be. Because we make it special.
In the evening, when she took her single, cherished book out of the chest to read by the fire, it would hold the same stories it always had, and so would her days, until they ended.
Her feet fell off the bed’s edge like lead weights, and the morning’s first sitting-up breath was a sigh. “It’s too early in the day for sighs,”
She thought of Dame Somnolence at the factory, whose advice to the girls was to “live bitter, so the crows will have no taste for you when you’re dead.”
Some kinds of misery make you hate the world, but some kinds make you hate yourself,
his look spoke. Some looks do, the way she remembered her mother’s eyes telling her as plain as happiness, in the time before grief, “I love you more than life, my sweet girl.”
“I will have you, and I will hold you. I will learn a thousand ways to make you weep. Your tears will be the sugar in my tea, your misery my delight,”
And in her shed by the dying fire, Neve sensed, as she had in the dream, that she was not alone. But it wasn’t a lurking feeling, as a figure in the night. It was the sense that she wasn’t alone in the world, and that was a very different thing.
Would she become numb to wonder, if this kept up, as she once had been to misery?
All the things, dreamed and undreamed, in the depth and breadth of the whole spinning world.
