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I don’t care much for pixies as a rule. They’re pretty but savage, and they’ll attack if you provoke them. Maybe that doesn’t sound like much of a threat, considering that the average pixie is about four inches tall and weighs three ounces soaking wet. They’re like mice with wings and thumbs, except for the part where mice don’t usually come armed with knives carved from broken beer bottles and homemade spears that may have been dipped in equally homemade poisons.
Cats never listen. They’re dependable that way; when Rome burned, the emperor’s cats still expected to be fed on time.
Cats put up with us, and in exchange, we treat them with respect, and we feed them.
the place stank of elegance and the sort of timelessness that only money can buy. Stasis is one of the benefits of being very, very rich. Nothing ever changes unless you let it.
I’ve worked with the police, and I’ve even liked some of them, but that doesn’t mean I have to like them as a breed. Power brings out the worst in almost everyone.
It’s not hard to marginalize people when they’ve already done it to themselves.
I think all kids are hungry for a kind word, not just the lost ones that wind up drifting into places like Home. They all react the same way when they’re given the validation they need, locking fear and love together so tightly that they never even notice the moment when they grow up.
Most of our legends say there are three roads to any destination: the hard way, the easy way, and the long way.
Sometimes reality stops being subtle in favor of smacking you upside the head.
It can’t all be dreams because a broken dream will kill you as surely as a nightmare will, and with a lot less mercy. At least the nightmares don’t smile while they take you down.
Smiling, I reached into my pocket and slipped him four of the mushrooms I’d plucked from the grass under my window. “Miss Suzy had a steamboat, the steamboat had a bell,” I said to him. He started to protest, and I finished, “Miss Suzy went to heaven, the steamboat went to New Jersey where it enjoyed a lucrative career in children’s programming.” The smell of copper and cut grass rose around me, twining around the toll taker’s head.
Never tempt fate. It plays for keeps.
The mixture of coffee and healing potion was sweet and sharp on my tongue, and it tasted like surviving to see tomorrow.
“We came here because no place else would take us when our momma died. They all said go away, come back when you’re older, when you know better, when you’ve learned. Only no one wants to teach us how to be older, or how to know better—not even Devin. They just teach us how to be broken.”
The brightness of his eyes had faded, turning slate gray, like a storm had come to his private sky. It had to happen eventually; October always brings rain, even in California.
What, are you happy that you’re going to die? Do you enjoy waking up every morning and realizing your body got a little bit closer to breaking in the night? Because I don’t.
