Acqua > Acqua's Quotes

“That's how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you'd have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and say your lines.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“This action will have no echo.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“Nina had grieved for her loss of power, for the connection she’d felt to the living world. She’d resented this shadow gift. It had seemed like a sham, a punishment. But just as surely as life connected everything, so did death. It was that endless, fast-running river. She’d dipped her fingers into its current, held the eddy of its power in her hand. She was the Queen of Mourning, and in its depths, she would never drown.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“Come forward.
Come in from the summer heat and the flies. Come in from that assault on all senses, that pummelling of rod and cone and drum and cilia. Come in from the great spotlight of the sun, sweeping across the white sands, making everyone, and therefore no one, a star.

Come inside and meet the prologue.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“She is dead. Almost certainly dead. Nearly conclusively dead. She is, at the very least, not answering her telephone.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“You're nobody's rainbow.
You're nobody's princess.
You're nobody's doorway but your own, and the only one who gets to tell you how your story ends is you.”
― Seanan mcguire , Every Heart a Doorway

“Her heart was a river that carried her to the sea.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“I have wanted to hate her all my life, but as I've learned since my early days pining after Rasida, I am drawn to and desire my enemies, and it may be my worst flaw.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Stars Are Legion

“I wish I knew I was doing this right," Cheris said, "but there's nothing to it but to move forward."

"The only unforgivable sin in war is standing still," Jedao said. "It's better to be doing the wrong thing wholeheartedly than freeze.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Ninefox Gambit

“I’m invisible. You can’t harass a ghost.”
― Amelinda Bérubé, The Dark Beneath the Ice

“Maybe there were people who lived those lives. Maybe this girl was one of them. But what about the rest of us? What about the nobodies and the nothings, the invisible girls? We learn to hold our heads as if we wear crowns. We learn to wring magic from the ordinary. That was how you survived when you weren’t chosen, when there was no royal blood in your veins. When the world owed you nothing, you demanded something of it anyway.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“She was a world unknown. She was a place whose darkness held not fear, but the promise of stars.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, When the Moon Was Ours

“That was probably another thing Aracely had almost asked ten times, opening her mouth and then hesitating. Why, to Miel, a pumpkin couldn't just be a pumpkin. A question Aracely knew better than to say out loud.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, When the Moon Was Ours

“No,' she whispered over those fields. 'No, you can't have this part of me.'

If they tried to take Sam, she'd do anything she could to stop them, but that choice was his. This one was hers.

'I am not your garden,' she said, the words no louder than the thread of her mother's voice the wind carried.

'I am not one of your pumpkin vines.'

'You do not own what I grow.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, When the Moon Was Ours

“The story of the ugly duckling was never about the cygnet discovering he is lovely. It is not a story about realizing you have become beautiful.

It is about the sudden understanding that you are something other than what you thought you were, and that what you are is more beautiful than what you once thought you had to be.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Blanca & Roja

“I was a girl who would never exist in a fairy tale, not just because of the brown of my body but because of my heart, neither pure enough to be good nor cruel enough to be evil. I was a girl lost in the deep, narrow space between the two forms girls were allowed to take.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Blanca & Roja

“I am not as I once was. They have done this to me, broken me open and torn out my heart. I do not know who I am anymore.
I must try to remember.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

“Once you figure out what matters, you'll figure out how to be brave.”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After

“You can’t murder that which is eternal, that which will lie until death itself passes. But you can slow it, cripple it, hobble it.

You can hurt your nightmares; it’s a two-way street.”
― Cassandra Khaw, A Song for Quiet

“Phoenix Extravagant for destructive power, as befits an engine of war.”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Phoenix Extravagant

“Expansion History, and you came to the description of the triple sunrises you can see when you're hanging in Lsel Station's Lagrange point, and you thought, At last, there are words for how I feel, and they aren't even in my language―>
Yes, Mahit says. Yes, she does. That ache: longing and a violent sort of self-hatred, that only made the longing sharper.

We felt that way.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire