The Space Between Worlds (The Space Between Worlds #1)

by Micaiah Johnson

EVEN WORTHLESS THINGS can become valuable once they become rare.

Because that’s what a sister is: a piece of yourself you can finally love, because it’s in someone else.

human beings are unknowable. You can never know a single person fully, not even yourself.

Even if you think you know yourself in your safe glass castle, you don’t know yourself in the dirt.

What they don’t tell you about getting everything you ever wanted is the cold-sweat panic when you think about losing it. For someone who’d never had anything to lose, it’s like drowning, all the time.

I’m so good at not making an impression it’s a wonder I even leave footprints. Not once in my whole life have I been missed. I’ve collected marks from others all over, but I’ve never made one on someone else.

feel 372 deaths in my chest, hanging over my head like a heavenly host of guillotines.

“I am unknowable. Everyone is.”

Sometimes the path to an easy life makes you miserable.

It would never have been possible for me to forgive myself for staying with him so long, but it seems possible now.

If you must know anything, know that the hardest task is to live only once. —Ocean Vuong

Overpaying for honey from the poor makes them giddy.

What does it mean to miss the taste of ash on your lips? What does it mean to crave something toxic?

But even if I get an analyst job with a pay raise and citizenship and two bedrooms on a higher floor, I will have lost something I can never get back.

The multiverse isn’t just parallel universes accessible through science. They are in each of us, a kaleidoscope made of varying perceptions.

🤯

because all of us who were told we were nothing will never stop trying to be everything.

confused routine for reliability and reliability for safety.

had no idea the chaos I was capable of holding inside of me.

I’m not just a child of ash, I’m a child of blood,

They say hunting monsters will turn you into one. That isn’t what’s happening now. Sometimes to kill a dragon, you have to remember that you breathe fire too.

This isn’t a becoming; it’s a revealing. I’ve been a monster all along.

I could become the thing I’d always feared, and then I might never be afraid of anything again.

There have always been those who transcend, and traversing is just one way to walk between worlds.

It is only one world in infinite universes where this impossible happiness exists, but that is what makes it so valuable.