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“I did the same thing when I was your age,” said her grandmother. “I daresay I wasn’t like other girls harder than anyone else ever was. I was so unlike other girls that I wasn’t even like myself, except on Sundays.”
This is stupid. This isn’t suffering. I don’t get to feel bad about this. Feeling bad about feeling bad was not significantly better than feeling bad in the first place.
A witch’s garden gains a sense of itself before long, drinking magic in with the mulch and the rain.
“No magic,” said Mousebones. “When it’s that strong, being unmagical is a thing itself. Like being a white raven. White ravens aren’t really white, they’re just an absence of black. But they’re very good at it.”
“Naked and bloody we come into the world, and sometimes we go out of it the same way.” Livli draped a blanket over Gerta’s shoulders. “But it’s not a good way to spend the parts in between.
You’re a healthy young animal and you know it. And people who really live in their own flesh and know it and love it make lousy shapechangers.” “I…well. But Gerta doesn’t?” Livli shook her head. “Some people don’t. Their bodies carry them around, but they don’t live in them quite the same way.”
Horses are made of legs, the way that birds are made of wings,
Humans are made of brain.
“The sea is very large,” she said finally. “And it’s not like anything but itself. I can’t explain it. I liked living there, though.” “I would like to see it,” said Gerta. “It is very much worth seeing.”
If she was half an animal, let the animal half speak for her, then. The human part was tied up with human things like self-loathing, but that did not matter. There were no words in reindeer speech for I hate myself.
