Strange the Dreamer (Strange the Dreamer, #1)

by Laini Taylor

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.”

even the sight of a strong, bare arm crooked gently round a waist or shoulder could make her ache with the yearning to be held. To be one of a pair of bodies that knew that melting fusion. To reach and find. To be reached for and found. To belong to a mutual certainty.

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.

At the garden balustrade in the citadel of the Mesarthim, with ghosts peering over their shoulders, the godspawn watched their death ride down to Weep.

“You have ruined my tongue for all other tastes.”

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.

“I expect the heavens will survive,” he said, and then he kissed her.