More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
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.
“Dead men usually stay put.”
In the witch-tales it’s always the youngest who is the best-beloved, the most-worthy, the one bound for some grander destiny
Hush a bye, baby, bite your tongue, Not a word shall be sung. A spell for quiet, requiring a clipped feather & a bitten tongue
Dark
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.
Bye baby bunting, Mother’s gone a-hunting A spell to end what hasn’t yet begun, requiring pennyroyal & regret
How I feel about the results of this election.
She doesn’t know how to put any of her foolish, doomed wanting into words, so she shrugs at Madame Zina, feeling the bones of her shoulders grate.
Because survival is a selfish thing.
Oof
he was just one monster among many, one cruelty in an endless line.
women of words,
aka book lover
Just moonbeams and daydreams.
Sometimes a thing is too dangerous to be written down or said straight out. Sometimes you have to slip it in slantwise, half-hidden.”
Juniper wonders how a man like that—all pinkish and wet, like something recently shelled—could get elected to anything.
You can tell the wickedness of a witch by the wickedness of her ways.
“That was—that was witchcraft, Miss Quinn!”
the hot smell of witching.
hell, which had already broken loose, breaks looser.
Is that what mother’s love is like? A thing with teeth?
A familiar isn’t a spell or a pet. It’s witchcraft itself wearing an animal-skin.
Beatrice and her sisters chose nine o’clock in the evening because nine o’clock is a woman’s hour. The dinners have been served and the dishes dried and stacked, the children tucked into bed, the whiskies poured and served to the husbands. It’s the hour where a woman might sit in stillness, scheming and dreaming.
“Surely trust is never truly broken, but merely lost.”
She decides she doesn’t care, that maybe trust is neither lost nor found, broken nor mended, but merely given.
There are black wax candles dripping onto bronze saucers and green bottles lining the shelves with labels
A vibe.
“We are all what we have to be, to stay alive.
Because he doesn’t know how cold and cruel she is beneath the softness of her skin,
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?
The trick to doing something stupid is to do it very quickly, before anyone can shout wait!
I am terrified and I am terrible. I am fearful and I am something to be feared. She meets Miss Araminta’s eyes, dark and knowing, sharp and soft, and thinks maybe every mother is both things at once.
That’s all magic is, really: the space between what you have and what you need.”
“Yet he’s still scared. What is he afraid of?” “Same thing every powerful man is afraid of.” The Crone shrugs. “The day the truth comes out.”
“I have it on good authority that everyone is a witch, given the proper words and ways.”
Validation!
She knows that history digs a shallow grave, and that the past is always waiting to rise again.
