More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
It was make-believe, true, but even make-believe was a sort of belief.
I had expected inhuman tasks, supernatural quests, epic battles to bar my path, but what I had not expected was plain, ordinary human compassion.
After all, I was not a child of beauty; I was a child of the queer, the strange, and the wild.
Suddenly it was as though I could see the cobwebs of delusion I had woven about myself, through which I could see another world and another life.
“What’s the use of running, if we are on the wrong road?”
Der Erlkönig has ever stood between us and them, between the world of the living and the dead, the ordinary and the uncanny.”
Each mask was modeled after the same face—the men incredibly handsome, the women incredibly beautiful. All the men looked like Hans; all the women looked like Käthe, their faces frozen into bland, personable smiles.
I itched to join the musicians, but could not scrub away the hesitation of painful inadequacy that clung to me. I was unheard, uneducated, unpublished. Papa would say I was overreaching myself.
A seed began to unfurl deep within me. Long ago, I had planted my music in the dark places of my soul, away from the light. There was Josef, the gardener of my heart, but not even his gentle encouragement had been enough to coax that little seed into life. I could not let it grow. Not in the world I lived in. Not in the world above. That world needed Liesl, dutiful daughter and protective sister. To let that seed bloom would encourage a weed to grow, choking out the other lives that needed my care.
But now I was free. The music inside grew into a weed, a wildflower, a meadow, a forest. I spread my roots out, feeling the rush in my limbs. My
What will you do when there is no one left to take care of, no one left to look after? Is that when you will finally look after you?”
He had a way of attacking me with compassion. His unexpected kindness, more than his charm or beauty, was seductive.
Does the crown serve the king or the king serve the crown?
“If it were only feathers that could transform a sparrow into a peacock.” “A sparrow is beautiful in its own way,” Käthe said severely. “Don’t force yourself to be a peacock, Liesl. Embrace your sparrow self. Look.”
I had waited for this my entire life, I realized. Not to be found beautiful—but desirable. Wanted.
“After all, we all make sacrifices for love.” I leaned over and kissed my sister on the forehead. “We make them every day.”
I won’t settle for half your heart when I want your whole soul.
It is easier to give him my body than to give him my soul.
And beneath that memory, yet another. And another, and another. Assaults on my tender heart I had suffered until I learned to put my music away in a cage. I had pushed me, the real me, back behind the façade of a good girl, a dutiful daughter. I ceased to be me and became Liesl, the maiden in the shadows. I had been that Liesl for so long, I did not know my way back to the light.
“As you wish.”
More, I wanted more, I needed more. If Lucifer’s sin was pride, then mine was covetousness. More and more and more. It wasn’t enough. It would never be enough.
“Life is more than breath and more than blood. It is”—Thistle ate her strawberry with relish—“taste and touch and sight and sound and smell.”
So I tried my best to stifle hope. Because hope’s twin was despair, and despair was infinitely worse. If hope hurt, then despair was the absence of hurt. It was the absence of feeling. It was the absence of caring.
the idea of growing old gave me comfort. To grow old was to have lived a full life. Not all of us were so privileged as to have a full life.
This was the immortality humans were meant to have: to be remembered by those who loved us long after our bodies had crumbled into dust.
