Middlegame (Alchemical Journeys, #1)

by Seanan McGuire

“People pull your hair?” The thought is vaguely horrifying. Girls aren’t supposed to have their hair pulled. There’s nothing wrong with shoving them if they shove you first, but pulling hair is petty and mean, and it’s not supposed to happen. “If you were a girl, they’d pull your hair too,” she says matter-of-factly. “Girl nerds are in even more trouble than boy nerds, because everybody says we don’t exist, or if we do exist, it’s because we’re trying to get the boy nerds to like us. I don’t like any of the boy nerds in my school. I’m smarter than all of them, so they’re mean to me just like everybody else.”

Smart kids get put on a pedestal by parents and teachers alike, and the rest of the class gathers around the base of it throwing rocks, trying to knock them down. People who say “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” don’t understand how words can be stones, hard and sharp-edged and dangerous and capable of doing so much more harm than anything physical. If someone chucks a real stone at you on the playground, it leaves a bruise. Bruises heal. Bruises get people in trouble, too; bruises end with detentions for the rock-throwers, with disapproving parents ushered into private offices for serious conversations about bullying and bad behavior. Words almost never end that way.

Things that make too much sense will drop right through you. Metaphors snag and stay. You need things that will stay with you. You need to figure this out.

It’s better to let the people who enjoy playing with fire to finish before getting too close, at least if the goal is continuing to have hair that’s not burning.

“There’s no possible way it could happen, and that means it’s virtually guaranteed.”

You can’t save the world with math unless you can also change it with a question.”

The unspoken pieces of language are sometimes the most painful.

Dodger doesn’t know what she’s doing. That isn’t going to stop her from doing it.

This quote pretty much sums up life in the 21st century, for me.

“I’m the living incarnation of the force of Order,” she says. “I didn’t get cosmic knowledge or the ability to change the universe. I got the urge to organize your CDs.

Here is a secret about powerful men, one they would prefer go unspoken: their arrogance is one of the greatest forces in the universe. Even the most paranoid among them see what they want to see, believe what they want to believe, and this creates cracks through which the clever may insinuate themselves, changing the story around them.