Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children, #1)

by Seanan McGuire

Now I know that if you open the right door at the right time, you might finally find a place where you belong.

“Because hope is a knife that can cut through the foundations of the world,”

“Hope hurts. That’s what you need to learn, and fast, if you don’t want it to cut you open from the inside out. Hope is bad. Hope means you keep on holding to things that won’t ever be so again, and so you bleed an inch at a time until there’s

nothing left.

The mountain was as powerful as the tide, just … in a different way.

Call it irony, if you like, but we spend so

much time waiting for our boys to stray that they never have the opportunity. We notice the silence of men. We depend upon the silence of women.”

Their love wanted to fix her, and refused to see that she wasn’t broken.

Death was precious. That didn’t change the fact that life was limited.

This world is unforgiving and cruel to those it judges as even the slightest bit outside the norm. If anyone should be kind, understanding, accepting, loving to their fellow outcasts, it’s you. All of you. You are the guardians of the secrets of the universe, beloved of worlds that most will never dream of, much less see … can’t you see where you owe it to yourselves to be kind? To care for one another? No one outside this room will ever understand what you’ve been through the way the people around you right now understand. This is not your home. I know that better than most. But this is your way station and your sanctuary, and you will treat those around you with respect.”

Let this momentary kindness be forgotten, it said. Don’t let it linger, lest it be seen as weakness.

“I am a genius of infinite potential and highly limited patience. People shouldn’t try me so.”

she was a woman with something to protect. That made her more dangerous than they could ever have suspected.

Eleanor was trying to save her beloved charges in the only way she knew. She was hurting them in the process.

You’re nobody’s rainbow. You’re nobody’s princess. You’re nobody’s doorway but your own, and the only one who gets to tell you how your story ends is you.