Crooked Kingdom (Six of Crows, #2)

by Leigh Bardugo

We meet fear, he’d said. We greet the unexpected visitor and listen to what he has to tell us. When fear arrives, something is about to happen.

“I would come for you,” he said, and when he saw the wary look she shot him, he said it again. “I would come for you. And if I couldn’t walk, I’d crawl to you, and no matter how broken we were, we’d fight our way out together—knives drawn, pistols blazing. Because that’s what we do. We never stop fighting.”

“Zoya used to say that fear is a phoenix. You can watch it burn a thousand times and still it will return.”

“I,” she said, planting a hand on her hip, “am a delicate flower.” “You aren’t a flower, you’re every blossom in the wood blooming at once. You are a tidal wave. You’re a stampede. You are overwhelming.”

You’re weak because you’re afraid of people seeing your weakness. You’re letting shame decide who you are.

“Mati en sheva yelu. This action will have no echo. It means we won’t repeat the same mistakes, that we won’t continue to do harm.”

“Stop treating your pain like it’s something you imagined. If you see the wound is real, then you can heal it.”

And that was what destroyed you in the end: the longing for something you could never have.

What about the nobodies and the nothings, the invisible girls? We learn to hold our heads as if we wear crowns. We learn to wring magic from the ordinary. That was how you survived when you weren’t chosen, when there was no royal blood in your veins. When the world owed you nothing, you demanded something of it anyway.