The Darkest Part of the Forest

by Holly Black

She remembered that she was supposed to be one of them and tried not to throw up.

A little girl can find a dead boy and lose her dog and believe that she could make sure no one else was lost.

She felt as if she’d waited her whole life for him to wake up and say those words to her. But now that he had, she was absolutely terrified.

For all that they’d claimed they could tell each other stuff, they told each other nothing.

What she did know was that normal was a lot more tempting when it was out of reach.

the names she remembered first were of the ones who’d hated her after, because she remembered things that hurt more easily than anything nice.

To Ben, love was the flame in which he wanted to be reborn. He wanted to be remade by it.

We are all capable of great self-deception when it serves us.”

He kissed her as though he thought she’d turn to smoke the moment he stopped.

The worst part was how quietly she wept, as if she’d taught herself how, as if she was so used to doing it that it had just become the way she cried.

He saw now the ways in which they tried to be careful with each other, afraid of hitting those raw places where they might hurt each other almost without trying. But sparing another person is a tricky thing. It’s easy to think you’re succeeding when you’re failing spectacularly.

All of Fairfold is blessed with my problems, and they do not lessen your own.

“You said you loved me so many times,” Severin told him softly, and hearing him say that made Ben flush hotly. “But maybe what you loved best was your own face reflected in the glass.”

And then Hazel understood. Ben was taking her through the storm of grief. He was singing her through the rage and despair. He was singing her through the terrible loneliness, because there was no way to shut off grief, no way to cast it aside or fight against it. The only way to end grief was to go through it.

“You can’t save a place. Sometimes you can’t even save a person.”

Once, there was a girl who vowed she would save everyone in the world, but forgot herself.

“Let me have this, Mother, because once they are dead, I can never have it again.”

Maybe he could love it the way he’d never let himself before, because it was too terrifying to love something he couldn’t control, because it was too awful to hurt people and love what hurt them.

no matter how hard she hugged him, she knew it would never be enough.