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.

Sometimes she wished she knew how to get back to the girl who’d cared about such things. Other times, she was grateful beyond words that she couldn’t.

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.”

you are not mad—and so what if you were? This world is unforgiving and cruel to those it judges as even the slightest bit outside the norm.

The duality of the phrase was like the duality of the doors: they changed lives, and they destroyed them, all with the same, simple invitation.

I’m a little insulted that you feel the need to put a lacy bow on the crime before you can believe I committed it,”

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.

“Nobody gets to tell me how my story ends but me.”

Like a key that finds its keyhole, Nancy was finally home.