Jane Steele

by Lyndsay Faye

Only that my eyes are tired and nothing in the new novel I thought I’d like so well means as much to me as I imagined it would.

“Do you know where the wicked go after death?” “They go to hell,” was my ready and orthodox answer. . . . “What must you do to avoid it?” I deliberated a moment; my answer, when it did come, was objectionable: “I must keep in good health, and not die.”

Some memoirs explain social hierarchies by means of illustrative anecdotes, but mine is about homicide, not ladies’ schools.

This was the day I learnt that friendship need not be labelled as such in order to be a very similar thing indeed.

Grief is a strange passenger; it rides on one’s shoulder quiet as a guardian angel one moment, then sinks razor talons into one’s collarbones the next.

If I must go to hell to find my mother again, so be it: I will be another embodied disaster. But I will be a beautiful disaster.

In a mansion, blessings are lost amidst bric-a-brac; in a pit, they shimmer like the flash of dragonfly wings.

We are all of us daily decaying, after all; the speed is our only variant.

It was not welcoming, but it was galvanising. Arguing with London was useless; she was inexorable, sure as the feral dawn.

New York, as well

secrets decay, as corpses do, growing ranker over time.

she probably expected a tyrant, but I recalled tyranny and preferred rebellion.

have always thought that words are alive a little, for they can whisper sweet nothings and roar dragon flame with equal efficiency.

a ghost with a soul of smoke and secrets.

Until something has been taken from you, it is difficult to gauge what sort of holes will be left by its absence.

Some tragedies bind us, as lies do; they are ropes braided of hurt and bitterness, and you cannot ever fully understand how pinioned you are until the ties are loosened. Other tragedies free us, as Clarke’s confession freed me. You cannot know what it means, reader, to have thought yourself despised for your unworthiness for a period of years—to have supposed your very nature poison, and your friend right to have thus abandoned you—and to learn thereafter that you were loved not too little but too well.

I cannot imagine a happier circumstance than leading a life spiced with murder and intrigue alongside the man I love.

hope that the epitaph of the human race when the world ends will be: Here perished a species which lived to tell stories. We tell stories to strangers to ingratiate ourselves, stories to lovers to better adhere us skin to skin, stories in our heads to banish the demons. When we tell the truth, often we are callous; when we tell lies, often we are kind. Through it all, we tell stories, and we own an uncanny knack for the task.