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will that purged the witches from the world. He says women are sinful by nature and that magic in their hands turns naturally to rot and ruin, like the first witch Eve who poisoned the Garden and doomed mankind, like her daughters’ daughters who poisoned the world with the plague.
beholder. She said proper witching is just a conversation with that red heartbeat, which only ever takes three things: the will to listen to it, the words to speak with it, and the way to let it into the world. The will, the words, and the way.
She taught us everything important comes in threes: little pigs, billy goats gruff, chances to guess unguessable names. Sisters.
A wise woman keeps her burning on the inside.
Aren’t you tired yet? Of being cast down and cast aside? Of making do with crumbs when once we wore crowns? She’s asking: Aren’t you angry yet?
Every woman draws a circle around herself. Sometimes she has to be the only thing inside it.
Agnes learned young that you have a family right up until you don’t. You take care of people right up until you can’t, until you have to choose between staying and surviving.
(Let a woman live in quietude, Timothy 2:11).
he was just one monster among many, one cruelty in an endless line. It’s safer to walk alone.
The rules aren’t written down anywhere, but the important rules rarely are.
Agnes wants to be angry at her—for being so careless and cruel and so terribly young—but she can’t quite manage it. She’s been all of those things herself; she knows the black alchemy that transmutes hurt into hate.
Fate is a story people tell themselves so they can believe everything happens for a reason, that the whole awful world is fitted together
“Good. That’s good. That is, I didn’t think there were any understanding men.” Her tone is too bitter; Quinn’s sly smile fades a little. “Your father really did a number on the three of you, didn’t he.”
But Beatrice hasn’t much mentioned her own family, for the same reason a person doesn’t much mention carrion at the dinner table.
“Surely trust is never truly broken, but merely lost.”
I wonder sometimes where the first witch came from. If perhaps Adam deserved Eve’s curse.” His smile twists. “If behind every witch is a woman wronged.”
eyes. But she should have known no man ever loved a woman’s strength—they only love the place where it runs out. They love a strong will finally broken, a straight spine bent.
“You girls have done very well.” Juniper wants to write the word girls on a ribbon and strangle him with it.
Juniper gives him the sullen shrug that used to drive her daddy to drink.
“Oh, horseshit.” Juniper’s voice is somehow both wet and scorched, terrible to hear. “How come you get one before me?” Then, with a strange, boneless grace, she collapses.
The problem with saving someone, Bella thinks, is that they so often refuse to remain saved. They
An angry woman is a smart woman, Mags used to say.
behind every witch is a woman wronged.
It’s what Juniper herself might have done, back when she was a heartless, hurting thing. Now she wants so much more than merely to survive.
because they are tired of stolen children and missing women, of creeping and hiding, of raids and arrests.
At least their daddy never forced them to love him; at least he never took their selves or souls away.
Maleficae quondam, maleficaeque futurae.” She ignores Juniper’s softly muttered, Jesus, Bell. “In English it’s ‘witches once and witches in the future.’”
a witch is merely a woman who needs more than she has.
death doesn’t brook any back-talk or take-backs.
