Strange the Dreamer (Strange the Dreamer, #1)

by Laini Taylor

“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.”

“My spirit is fine.” “Then you’re going sadly wrong. You’re young. Your spirit shouldn’t be ‘fine.’ It should be effervescent.”

“You call it an open mind to believe men flew down from the skies on fiery wings?” “And women,” said Lazlo. “It’s a woeful species that’s all male.”

If Calixte did find his face lovely—which he found distinctly implausible, considering its centerpiece—there was nothing like attraction or desire behind it. No, he had seen the way she looked at Tzara, and the way Tzara looked at her, and that made for a fairly thorough education on the subject of desire.

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.

Her pulse was frantic, her breathing ragged, and it seemed impossible that people could live at all with such flimsy stuff as skin keeping blood, breath, and spirit safe inside their bodies.