More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
That temper will get you burnt at the damn stake, Mama Mags used to tell her. A wise woman keeps her burning on the inside.
She’s asking: 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.
If he peeled back her pretty skin he’d find nothing soft or sweet at all, just busted glass and ashes and the desperate, animal will to stay alive.
She tosses the words behind her like coins for beggars, a careless jumble, as she reaches for the door.
Bella informs her that this is the precise reason why women’s dresses no longer have pockets, to show they bear no witch-ways or ill intentions, and Juniper responds that she has both, thank you very damn much.
(When she was younger she permitted herself to want such things. To admire a woman’s peony-petal lips or the delicate hollow of her throat. She learned her lesson.)
“It’s a risk just to be a woman, in my experience. No matter how healthy or hardworking she is.”
“Yes, well, you’re a plague and a calamity and you should be locked up for the safety of the city.”
She wonders if trust, once lost, can ever truly be found again, and if she’s being a fool (two-one-thousand). She decides she doesn’t care, that maybe trust is neither lost nor found, broken nor mended, but merely given.
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.
What my mother taught me is this: you hide the most important things in the places that matter least. Women’s clothes, children’s toys, songs… Places a man would never look.”
I think she thought if she made herself small enough and quiet enough, she would be safe.” She was wrong.
She thought survival was a selfish thing, a circle drawn tight around your heart. She thought the more people you let inside that circle the more ways the world had to hurt you, the more ways you could fail them and be failed in turn. But what if it’s the opposite, and there are more people to catch you when you fall? What if there’s an invisible tipping point somewhere along the way when one becomes three becomes infinite, when there are so many of you inside that circle that you become hydra-headed, invincible?
“And—it’s going to get bad, isn’t it? They’re going to come for all of us, for every woman who knows more than she should, who doesn’t smile when she’s told to.”
That’s all magic is, really: the space between what you have and what you need.”
She is distantly surprised by how easily the word help slips between her lips. Is this what it is to draw your circle wide, to need and be needed in turn?
“Writing a book is dangerous business, if done correctly.”
She begins to believe that the words and ways are whichever ones a woman has, and that a witch is merely a woman who needs more than she has.
