Little Thieves (Little Thieves, #1)

by Margaret Owen

In the world I knew, there were three reasons a person would be wanted: for profit, pleasure, or power. If you could satisfy only one, they used you. Two, they saw you. Three, they served you.

I’m alone, and nothing and no one will save me but myself.

Just because you can survive without someone doesn’t mean they’re unwanted.

I’ve read fairy tales, of course, and listened to plaintive love songs, but I never understood why anyone would wake up after a hundred years and marry the prince who broke into their bedroom for a kiss. Or dance with a stranger once and decide to spend the rest of their lives together. I always felt a baffled kind of melancholy when others raptured over love at first sight, like maybe something was wrong with me, maybe I didn’t know how to love someone at all.

“Men will be cruel, but they will be less cruel when you are beautiful.”

And when someone decides to hurt you, no matter how much you like them, it changes things.

What a terrible, foolish mistake, to think loyalty would ever serve me in kind.

There is one person in this world who I can trust to need me, and that is myself alone.

I can’t believe that after—after everything, you still only care about yourself!” “BECAUSE I’M THE ONLY ONE WHO DOES!”

Nothing stolen is ever mine. But there’s another truth on the other side of that coin: What is mine can always be stolen.

He believes that he is a victim, because the life he has is not the one he thinks he is owed. That in that way, the world betrayed him, just as it betrayed me. That in this, he knows me; in this, we are the same. But he will never understand that girls like me become liars, thieves, ghosts, all to survive men like him.

I know bravery is real because I see you choose it every day.

“I had seconds left,” I say quietly. “You have years.”

damn