Strange the Dreamer (Strange the Dreamer, #1)

by Laini Taylor

“And none of us became children to be orphans.”

He knew that, but the dream chooses the dreamer, not the other way around.

“Life won’t just happen to you, boy,” he said. “You have to happen to it. Remember: The spirit grows sluggish when you neglect the passions.”

And that’s how you go on. You lay laughter over the dark parts. The more dark parts, the more you have to laugh. With defiance, with abandon, with hysteria, any way you can.

For what was a person but the sum of all the scraps of their memory and experience: a finite set of components with an infinite array of expressions.

it seemed impossible that people could live at all with such flimsy stuff as skin keeping blood, breath, and spirit safe inside their bodies.

The function of hate, as Sarai saw it, was to stamp out compassion—to close a door in one’s own self and forget it was ever there. If you had hate, then you could see suffering—and cause it—and feel nothing except perhaps a sordid vindication.

Here was the radical notion that you might help someone simply because they needed it.

Inside a dream. Within a lost city. In the shadow of an angel. At the brink of calamity.

Inside a mist, inside a dream, a young man and woman were remade.

“It was the hate of the used and tormented, who are the children of the used and tormented, and whose own children will be used and tormented. And it was love,” she went on, and she put that into her voice, too, as well as she was able. Love that sets forth the soul like springtime and ripens it like summer. Love as rarely exists in reality, as if a master alchemist has taken it and distilled out all the impurities, every petty disenchantment, every unworthy thought, into a perfect elixir, sweet and deep and all-consuming. “He loved her so much,” she whispered. “It was all a lie. It was a violation. But it didn’t matter, did it, because when Isagol made you feel something, it became real. He hated her. And he loved her. And he killed her.”

He would recognize this later as the moment his center of gravity shifted: from being one of one—a pillar alone, apart—to being half of something that would fall if either side were cut away.

It might have been brief, but so much of a kiss—a first kiss, especially—is the moment before your lips touch, and before your eyes close, when you’re filled with the sight of each other, and with the compulsion, the pull, and it’s like . . . it’s like . . . finding a book inside another book. A small treasure of a book hidden inside a big common one—like . . . spells printed on dragonfly wings, discovered tucked inside a cookery book, right between the recipes for cabbages and corn. That’s what a kiss is like, he thought, no matter how brief: It’s a tiny, magical story, and a miraculous interruption of the mundane.

“The moon on a bracelet and the sun in a jar,”