The Language of Thorns: Midnight Tales and Dangerous Magic (Grishaverse, #0.5 & 2.5 & 2.6)

by Leigh Bardugo

You see, some people are born with a piece of night inside, and that hollow place can never be filled—not with all the good food or sunshine in the world. That emptiness cannot be banished, and so some days we wake with the feeling of the wind blowing through, and we must simply endure it as the boy did.”

“Do not behave as a tyrant and then tell me to scold a tyrant to behave. Show mercy and mercy you may be shown.”

This goes to show you that sometimes the unseen is not to be feared and that those meant to love us most are not always the ones who do.”

No prince is worth your life.” Ayama supposed it depended on the prince.

“And what lesson am I to learn from this story?” asked the beast when she was done. “That there are better things than princes.”

“I will love an honest monster before I swear loyalty to a treacherous king.”

Now in the valley, the people care less for pretty faces. Mothers pat their pregnant bellies and whisper prayers for the future. They pray for rain in the long summer. They pray that their children will be brave and clever and strong, that they will tell the true stories instead of the easy ones. They pray for sons with red eyes and daughters with horns.

“I can bear ugliness,” he said. “I find the one thing I cannot live with is death.”

“It is always the same trap,” she said gently. “You longed for conversation. The bear craved jokes. The gray wolf missed music. The boar just wanted someone to tell her troubles to. The trap is loneliness, and none of us escapes it. Not even me.”

The fox and the nightingale made a quiet life together. A lesser creature might have held Koja’s mistakes against him, might have mocked him for his pride. But Lula was not only clever. She was wise.

But sometimes she felt her curiosity clawing at her like a different kind of hunger.

Dark things have a way of slipping in through narrow spaces.

But as you leave that dark gap in the trees behind, remember that to use a thing is not to own it. And should you ever take a bride, listen closely to her questions. In them you may hear her true name like the thunder of a lost river, like the sighing of the sea.

Wanting is why people get up in the morning. It gives them something to dream of at night. The more I wanted, the more I became like them, the more real I became.”

This is the problem with making a thing forbidden. It does nothing but build an ache in the heart.

For the briefest moment, Ulla despised Signy, as we can only hate those who rescue us from loneliness.

But hope rises like water trapped by a dam, higher and higher, in increments that mean nothing until you face the flood.

The storm had brought Ulla to the cold shelter of the northern islands, to the darkened caves and flat black pools where she remains to this day, waiting for the lonely, the ambitious, the clever, the frail, for all those willing to strike a bargain. She never waits for long.