Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children, #2)

by Seanan McGuire

Some adventures require nothing more than a willing heart and the ability to trip over the cracks in the world.

The moon worries. We may not know how we know that, but we know it all the same: that the moon watches, and the moon worries, and the moon will always love us, no matter what.

Every choice feeds every choice that comes after, whether we want those choices or no.)

The trouble with denying children the freedom to be themselves—with forcing them into an idea of what they should be, not allowing them to choose their own paths—is that all too often, the one drawing the design knows nothing of the desires of their model. Children are not formless clay, to be shaped according to the sculptor’s whim, nor are they blank but identical dolls, waiting to be slipped into the mode that suits them best.

Someone with sharp enough eyes might see the instant where one wounded heart begins to rot while the other starts to heal. Time marches on.

There are moments that change everything, mired in the mass of more ordinary time like insects caught in amber. Without them, life would be a tame, predictable thing. But with them, ah. With them, life does as it will, like lightning, like the wind that blows across the castle battlements, and none may stop it, and none may tell it “no.”

A man who has lived his entire life in a cave does not mourn the sun until he sees it, and once he has, he can never go back underground.)

They have been changed. The story changes with them.

“I am what I am, and there’s much about me that won’t be changed with any amount of wishing or wanting. I’m sorry for that. I’d trade a great deal to share an afternoon in the hay with you, dust in the air and sweat on our skins and neither of us caring. But I’m afraid the experience would drive me mad. I am a creature of sterile environments. It’s too late for me to change.”

Beauty was all the brighter against a background of briars.

Just because something was unfamiliar, that didn’t mean it had sharper teeth or crueler claws than the monster they already knew.

The Moors were beautiful in their own way, and if their beauty was the quiet sort that required time and introspection to be seen, well, there was nothing wrong with that. The best beauty was the sort that took some seeking.

Time is the alchemy that turns compassion into love,