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Fairy tales have happy endings. Fables are meant as cautionary tales, lessons intended to teach us about life and its consequences.
Always, there must be free will. It is not for us to impose our beliefs on others or to endeavor to persuade one to the practices of our faith. We do not seek those who need our help. Rather, they must seek us and request our assistance.
A crucifix around your neck and a charme magique in your pocket may keep away the witch hunters, but they are worthless against the Nazis.
The female sex has always been troublesome for those in power, because we see things, know things.
People always find a way to justify their hate—and give others an excuse to fall in line. They put words in people’s mouths, plant them like viruses, then watch them spread.
sin, which she claimed was a ruse to make women apologize for what they wanted.
Pity is my poison.”
not all are destined for such fairy-tale endings. Some are unable, others unwilling, and still more have been taught they are undeserving.
We do not create love from thin air, using philters or glamours or any other manner of manipulation. We do not create love at all. We merely shepherd its expression and assure its survival.
“We’re all a collection of our stories, chérie. Our joys and sorrows. Our loves and losses. That is who we are, a tally of all our agonies and ecstasies. Sometimes the agonies leave a mark, like a bruise on the soul. We do our best to hide them from the world, and from ourselves too. Because we’re afraid of being fragile. Of being damaged.
hope costs us nothing.”
le gardien des fins heureuses—the keeper of happy endings.
To ensure a happy ending, a bride must be willing to give her whole heart to the man she marries. Her spine, however, must at all times remain her own.
I couldn’t just lie down and die, even when I wanted to.”
“Being strong for too long makes one brittle, chérie. And brittle things break easily.”
“All right, pizza. But none of that pineapple nonsense.”
“Your mother is the baby listed on the adoption decree, Rory. Which makes Soline your grandmother. And my brother your grandfather.”
“How a person behaves toward us is never about us, Rory. It’s about them.
“In France we say, tu me manques. It means ‘you are missing from me.’ Not I miss you—the way Americans say it—but you are missing from me. The part of you that is a part of me . . . is gone. This is how it is for her. There’s a void in her life where you used to be, and she doesn’t know how to fill it.”
There is a grief worse than death. It is the grief of a life half-lived. Not because you don’t know what could have been but because you do.
Always be mindful of the Rule of Three. Three times your deed return to thee. Work ill and thrice ill winds shall come. Work love and thrice love finds a home.
Lovers wound one another for many reasons, but in the end, fear is always at the root of it. It’s a hard thing, perhaps the hardest of all, to trust when we’re afraid—to open ourselves to the risk of forgiveness. But forgiveness is the greatest magick of all. Forgiveness makes all things new.
we create our own curses and carry them through life because we’ve been told it’s our lot. We’re taught to relive our mothers’ heartaches, to accept their sufferings as our own, and pass them on to the next generation, again and again, until one of us at long last says no, and the curse is finally broken. Because we’ve discovered a new kind of magick—the kind that comes with choosing for ourselves, with saying I will do something else, be something else, have something else. This was the lesson Maman was trying to teach me the night she slipped away. There are no curses. Only patterns meant to
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