Heartless

by Marissa Meyer

“Nevermore,” said his Raven, who was perched on the edge of a metal bucket.

it is better to have eaten and lost than never to have eaten at all.”

“It is a dangerous thing to unbelieve something only because it frightens you.”

everyone would be willing to pretend it away rather than upset their pleasant lives.

“Fascinating, isn’t it, how often heroic and foolish turn out to be one and the same.

“Good eve, fair lady, your forgiveness we implore, to come so brashly tapping, tapping at your chamber door.”

I love how she wrote the raven after Edgar Allan Poe’s poem.

“I’m not sure this is a good idea.” “That’s because it’s most likely a very bad idea.”

“Impossible is your specialty.”

“I’ve had such a night. I hardly know where to begin.” “At the beginning would be advisable.”

Perhaps she didn’t know him, but she was more certain than ever that she desperately wanted to.

“Reputations are fickle. Profits are not.”

But, like all tragedies in Hearts, it had been hushed and swept away, never to be spoken of again.

“You do know that telling a secret destroys its secrecy, don’t you?”

My head tells me it will never happen, but my heart—” “Sometimes your heart is the only thing worth listening to.”

“The moral of that, of course, is that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’”

“Off with its head,” she whispered to herself,

It all started with the Jabberwock 😏

“Everyone always underestimates the idiot.”

“What is luxury if your life is a lie?

He didn’t seem happy about it, but neither did he complain.

One to be a murderer, the other to be martyred, One to be a monarch, the other to go mad.

Her cries died in her throat and were buried there, suffocated by the fury that was even now pounding, shrieking, demanding to be released. She would kill Peter. She would find him and she would kill him. She would have his head.

Her agony turned to fury when Time refused to answer her. There was no this time, no next time, no time at all.

“But hoping,” he said, “is how the impossible can be possible after all.”

“Your fears are correct. Such a heart can’t be mended. I hope I won’t be tasked with keeping such a useless artifact for much longer.”

A beating heart was skewered on its tip. It was broken, cut almost clean in half by a blackened fissure that was filled with dust and ash.

She no longer hurt. That broken heart had been killing her, and it was gone. Her sorrow. Her loss. Her pain, all gone. All that was left was the rage and the fury and the desperate need for vengeance that would soon, soon be hers.

But that no longer mattered to her. Such a heart was worthless, despite what everyone said. There was no value to it at all.

“For the murder of Jest, the court joker of Hearts, I sentence this man to death.” She spoke without feeling, unburdened by love or dreams or the pain of a broken heart. It was a new day in Hearts, and she was the Queen. “Off with his head.”