Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children, #1)

by Seanan McGuire

‘Real’ is a four-letter word, and I’ll thank you to use it as little as possible while you live under my roof.”

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.

Dinners are mostly dull, awful things, all meat and potatoes and things to build healthy minds and bodies. Boring. I bet your dinners with the dead people were a lot more fun.”

“Because it is, and it isn’t, and it doesn’t matter,”

You can’t paint underpants. Well, you can, but then they come out all stiff, and no one believes you didn’t mess them.”

“Am I the stress, or am I everything?”

“That’s the thing people forget when they start talking about things in terms of good and evil,” said Jack, turning to look at Lundy. She adjusted her glasses as she continued, “For us, the places we went were home. We didn’t care if they were good or evil or neutral or what. We cared about the fact that for the first time, we didn’t have to pretend to be something we weren’t. We just got to be. That made all the difference in the world.”

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.

“An unreported death is just a disappearance in its Sunday clothes.”

Loriel was still on the lawn, covered by a sheet, and for a moment, all Nancy could think was that if this didn’t stop soon, they were going to run out of bedclothes.

You can’t get blood out of taffeta, no matter how much you scrub.” “What fascinating life lessons you have to share,”

“Where did you find the whipped cream?” he asked. “You had milk, I had science,” said Jack. “It’s amazing how much of culinary achievement can be summarized by that sentence.