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Nobody seemed to notice that he flickered out of being, maybe because you had to be looking right at him and nobody ever was.
She’d tried to make friends, because she’d promised her mom (and witches kept their promises, she guessed)—
“My parents are cowards. They’re always terrified someone will notice them and they’ll have to explain themselves.”
“Children,” said Theodolphus Rose, “are adults who haven’t yet learned to make fear their hand puppet.” He smiled.
“A society that has to burn witches to hold itself together is a society that has already failed, and just doesn’t know it yet.”
thank all the birds in the sky,
Kevin and Patricia talked about music and the basic incompatibility between “cocktail party” and “dance party” (because a floor could be a dance floor or a sophisticated-mingling-with-shallow-glasses floor but not both: Floors were not infinitely subdividable or versatile).
Milton Dirth’s Ninth Maxim: Avoid publicity, except when you can wield it like a sledgehammer.
how do you ever know your own emotions are spontaneous and genuine, and not just a programmed set of responses?” “I don’t. I wonder about that all the time.”
I’m dedicated to not being the person they wanted to make me.”
no matter what you do, people are going to expect you to be someone you’re not. But if you’re clever and lucky and work your butt off, then you get to be surrounded by people who expect you to be the person you wish you were.”
nature doesn’t ‘find ways’ to do anything. Nature has no opinion, no agenda. Nature provides a playing field, a not particularly level one, on which we compete with all creatures great and small. It’s more that nature’s playing field is full of traps.”
She needs to let other people in.” “I let people in.” Patricia felt bloodless. Her ears were ringing. “Right now, this moment, I am interacting with people.” She should have known.
Diantha had this way of widening her eyes just before saying something to you, so you found yourself looking into her gaze and you felt sure that whatever she said next would be the most important thing you’d ever heard.
“I think that the most basic thing of ethics is being aware of how your actions affect others, and having an awareness of what they want and how they feel. And that’s always going to depend on who you’re dealing with.”
their love had always felt like a shared delusion propped up by pure bloody-mindedness.
They knew almost all of each other’s secrets, and that gave them license to talk in crappy puns and quotes from old hip-hop songs and fake Prohibition bootlegger slang, to the point where nobody else could even stand to be around them.
Her mind flashed on Laurence saying she had saved him, Laurence promising he would never run away from her again. It felt like something she had known a long time.
