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I would have chosen you, if they had let me choose.
It was about making peace with the impossible, and he couldn’t do that anymore. As Sarai melted right out of his arms, he knew: He could only make war with it.
This was what Minya knew: Have an enemy, be an enemy. Hate those who hate you. Hate them better. Hate them worse. Be the monster they fear the most. And whenever you can, and however you can, make them suffer.
“There’s the kind of guest who’s honored to be invited, and the kind who believes he’s bestowing honor by accepting.”
Many a choice is made in this way: by pretending it makes itself. And many a fate is decided by those who cannot decide.
Lately, with the village men eyeing them like livestock, invisibility had begun to seem appealing to Kora. “I’d rather inflict blindness,” Nova had asserted. “Why should we have to disappear just because men are animals?”
“That’s just his face,” said Calixte in a pretense of defending him. “He can’t help having indignant nostrils. Can you, Nero? You probably come from a long line of indignant nostrils. Aristocrats are issued them at birth, along with haughty eyes and judgmental cheeks.”
“He looks like somebody made him, and delivered him in a velvet-lined box. He probably plucks his eyebrows. I don’t know how you could possibly find that attractive.”
The mind is good at hiding things, but there’s something it cannot do: It can’t erase. It can only conceal, and concealed things are not gone. They rot. They fester, they leak poisons. They ache and stink. They hiss like serpents in tall grass.
She told Lazlo he didn’t have to stay. “Well, that’s a relief,” he said. “I was wondering when I’d get a break from the woman I love, who is the first and only person I’ve ever loved, and who I would happily sit beside under literally any circumstances forever.”
“Just because the power is mine, it doesn’t follow that all the choices are.”
She was an executioner by increments, a master of subtlety and tempter of fate, ever seeing how close she could slice the difference between hate and love.
A person could be driven mad by hate. It was a force as destructive as any Mesarthim gift, and harder to end than a god. The gods had been dead for fifteen years, after all, but their hate had lingered, and ruled in their stead.
His smiles had been pickled things, as though they’d been preserved in vinegar on some earlier occasion, to be pulled out to act as garnish to his artfully plated expressions.
There comes a certain point with a hope or a dream, when you either give it up or give up everything else. And if you choose the dream, if you keep on going, then you can never quit, because it’s all you are.
She had been a creature riddled with empty spaces, a ventriloquist, a puppet master, a little girl in pieces. Now she was just a person.
Once upon a time there was a silence that dreamed of becoming a song, and then I found you, and now everything is music.
Then it was all over. Or maybe it wasn’t. The ones who know can’t tell us, and the ones who tell us don’t know.
“Wishes don’t just come true. They’re only the target you paint around what you want. You still have to hit the bull’s-eye yourself.”
