More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
He knew the spot where the Lincoln Oak had toppled after Hurricane Sandy, revealing a human skeleton tangled in its roots, one of the many bodies never moved to Grove Street Cemetery.
They’ve fixed nearly every World Series, six Super Bowls, the Academy Awards, and at least one presidential election.
He didn’t know how precious a normal life could be, how easy it was to drift away from average. You started sleeping until noon, skipped one class, one day of school, lost one job, then another, forgot the way that normal people did things. You lost the language of ordinary life. And then, without meaning to, you crossed into a country from which you couldn’t return. You lived in a state where the ground always seemed to be slipping from beneath your feet, with no way back to someplace solid. It
People didn’t need magic to be terrible to each other.
“If you want to get Child Protective Services called fast, just start talking about ghost dick.”
chance to show someone else wonder, to watch them realize that they had not been lied to, that the world they’d been promised as children was not something that had to be abandoned, that there really was something lurking in the wood, beneath the stairs, between the stars, that everything was full of mystery.
Alex smiled then, a small thing, a glimpse of the girl lurking inside her, a happy, less haunted girl.
That was what magic did. It revealed the heart of who you’d been before life took away your belief in the possible. It gave back the world all lonely children longed for. That was what Lethe had done for him. Maybe it could do that for Alex as well.
“The purest Marxists are always men. Calamity comes too easily to women. Our lives can come apart in a single gesture, a rogue wave. And money? Money is the rock we cling to when the current would seize us.”
Mira loved art and truth and freedom. She didn’t want to be a part of the machine. But the machine didn’t care. The machine went on grinding and catching her up in its gears.
Grays loathed any reminder of death or dying—lamentations, dirges, poems about grief or loss, even a particularly well-phrased mortuary ad could do the trick.
“I c-c-class p-p-profanity with declarations of love. Best used
“Corpse beetles. They’ll eat you from the inside out.” Of course. Of course they would. Because magic was never good or kind.
Don’t go to a Manuscript party. Just don’t.
“A girl in black with a lot of eye makeup on?” She pulled a crown of plastic flowers sprayed with silver paint from her coat pocket and settled it on her head. “Queen Mab.”
thousand small acts of deception,
Why couldn’t people just have a quality drink and a conversation?
The words tangled together, caught on the spokes of a wheel, the points of a crown.
Have power on this dark land to lighten it, and power on this dead world to make it live.
But Salome clenched her fists. “You can’t just do things like that. You’ll go to jail.” “Probably,” said Alex. “But you’ll still look like a brother-fucking hillbilly.”
“What is wrong with you?” Dawes spat as Alex joined her at the nondescript door that led to the temple room, the Bridegroom trailing behind. “I’m a bad dancer and I don’t floss. What’s wrong with you?”
Once a mask was off you couldn’t just slide it ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
“There are worse things than death, Miss Stern.”
There were always excuses for why girls died.
Alex didn’t really know what she missed, only that she was homesick for something, maybe for someone, she’d never been.
Peace was like any high. It couldn’t last. It was an illusion, something that could be interrupted in a moment and lost forever.
your ass from a hot rock.”
Death waits on black wings and we stand hoplite, hussar, dragoon.
“My name is Galaxy, you fucking glutton.”
