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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Let’s start with a love story. Or maybe it’s another horror story. It seems like the difference is mostly in where the ending comes.
Fairy tales have a moral: Stay on the path. Don’t trust wolves. Don’t steal things, not even things you think no normal person would care about. Share your food but don’t trust people who want to share their food with you; don’t eat their shiny red apples, nor their candy houses, nor any of it. Be nice, always nice, and polite to everyone: kings and beggars, witches and wounded bears. Don’t break a promise. Be bold, be bold, but not too bold. It’s important that we learn the lessons our mother didn’t.
Fairy tales are full of girls who wait, who endure, who suffer. Good girls. Obedient girls. Girls who crush nettles until their hands bleed. Girls who haul water for witches. Girls who wander through deserts or sleep in ashes or make homes for transformed brothers in the woods. Girls without hands, without eyes, without the power of speech, without any power at all. But then a prince rides up and sees the girl and finds her beautiful. Beautiful, not despite her suffering, but because of it.
Be bold, be bold, but not too bold. Be good, but not too good. Be pretty, but not too pretty. Be honest, but not too honest. Maybe no one got lucky. Maybe it was too hard.
“Love is a noble cause,” Vivi reminded her. “How can anything done in the service of a noble cause be wrong?”
I let myself relax. I let myself believe that the worst was behind me. I let myself pretend.
“You’re awful.” He said it as though he was delighted. “And the worst part is that you believe otherwise.”
You’re a hungry person sitting in front of a banquet, refusing to eat.”
“Sometimes it’s easier to be mad at the people close to us,” Vivi said, “than to be mad at the people who deserve it.”
“You came here,” he said, as though it had never occurred to him I could do that. I suppose that’s one good thing about being obedient and faithful and good. People think you will never surprise them.
