Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children, #1)

by Seanan McGuire

Narrate the impossible things, turn them into a story, and they could be controlled.

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.

Most of them had been looking for smaller waists, clearer complexions, and richer boyfriends, spurred on by a deeply ingrained self-loathing that had been manufactured for them before they were old enough to understand the kind of quicksand they were sinking in.

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.

This world is unforgiving and cruel to those it judges as even the slightest bit outside the norm.

Flirting was safe, flirting was fun; flirting was a way of interacting with her peers without anyone realizing that there was anything strange about her. She could have flirted forever. It was just the things that came after flirting that she had no interest in.

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.