More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Do not play games with your future. It permits the possibility of losing.”
IT’S THE LESSON YOUNG GIRLS EVERYWHERE were taught their entire lives—don’t be seduced by the men you meet, protect your virtue—until, of course, their entire lives depended on seduction by the right man. It was an impossible situation, a trick of society as a whole: force women to live at the mercy of whichever man wants them but shame them for anything they might do to get a man to want them.
Be patient, be silent, be beautiful and untouched as an orchid, and then and only then will your reward come: a bell jar to keep you safe.
“Dead bodies are never going to bite you. They’re never going to do anything to you. It’s living things that hurt you.”
Neither had known it could feel like this, that it was supposed to feel like this: effortless. It was as if the other’s lips were the only place they’d ever belonged, and fate itself had brought them to this very moment, terrified and aching in a half-dug grave, just so the two of them could come together.
“One book? One book? Now you’re being absurd. What if I finish it? Or what if I find it impossibly dull, what then? What am I supposed to read if I either complete the book I brought or I otherwise discover it to be unreadable? Or what if it no longer holds my attention? Someone could spill tea on it. There. Think of that. Someone could spill tea on my one book, and then I would be marooned. Honestly, Iona, you must use your head.”
“Someone should tell you that you’re beautiful every time the sun comes up. Someone should tell you you’re beautiful on Wednesdays. And at teatime. Someone should tell you you’re beautiful on Christmas Day and Christmas Eve and the evening before Christmas Eve, and on Easter. He should tell you on Guy Fawkes Night and on New Year’s, and on the eighth of August, just because.”
“Hazel Sinnett, you are the most miraculous creature I have ever come across, and I am going to be thinking about how beautiful you are until the day I die.”
Love is nothing but the prolonged agony of waiting for it to end. The fear of losing the ones we love makes us do selfish and foolish and cruel things. The only freedom is freedom from love, and once your love is gone, it can be perfect, crystallized in your memory forever.”
“My heart is yours, Hazel Sinnett,” Jack said. “Forever. Beating or still.” “Beating or still,” she said.
