Elizabeth > Elizabeth's Quotes

“The old order, it is good for the old. A farmer wants his son to be afraid of beautiful women, so that he will not leave home too soon, so he tells a story about how one drowned his brother’s cousin’s friend in a lake, not because he was a pig who deserved to be drowned, but because beautiful women are bad, and also witches. And it doesn’t matter that she didn’t ask to be beautiful, or to be born in a lake, or to live forever, or to not know how men breathe until they stop doing it.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“Koschei, Koschei,” she whispered. “What would I have been if I had never seen the birds? I am no one; I am nothing. I am a blank paper on which you and your magic wrote a girl. Just the kind of girl you wanted, all hungry and hurt and needing. A machine for loving you. Nothing in me was not made by you.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“She was not filled up with the sight of him, the way she had seen her sisters fill up, like silk balloons, like wineskins. Instead, he seemed to land heavily within her, like a black stone falling.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“When I say forever,' Koschei whispered, 'I mean until the black death of the world. An Ivan means just the present moment, the flickering light of it, in a green field, his mouth on yours. He means the stretching of that moment. But forever isn't bright; it isn't like that. Forever is cold and hard and final.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“After love, no one is what they were before.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“The man who knelt before her would have sprung from her needles, even down the ghostly flecks of silver in his hair. She had not known before that she wanted all these things, that she preferred dark hair and a slightly cruel expression, that she wishes for tallness, or that a man kneeling might thrill her.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“No, not like this, when I have not seen you without your skin on, when I know nothing, when I am not safe. Not you, whose name all my nightmares know.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“Yes," he growled, "yes, I will put you there and turn out the light in your eyes and come to stare at you for centuries, to pore over you, because you are mine, my treasure, my hoard, and I cannot keep you and I cannot let you go.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“Why should he be spared?'
'Someone ought to be.' And it will not be me. I have survived, but I have not been spared.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“Still, she was not sorry. If the world is divided into seeing and not seeing, Marya thought, I shall always choose to see.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“I look at you, Masha, and it is like drinking cold water. I look at you and it is like my throat being cut.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“I am not a little girl anymore, dazzled by your magic. It is my magic, now, too.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“If a story repeated itself so many times over, building itself up brick by brick, did it eventually become the truth? A house with no doors and no windows, offering no escape.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“That was the cruelest irony: the more you did to save yourself, the less you became a person worth saving.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“I was a woman when it was convenient to blame me, and a girl when they wanted to use me.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“The Fairy King was all of them," said Angharad. "Every wanting man has the same wound he can use to slip in.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“I wish I had fought.” Effy surprised herself by saying it. The words had leaped out of her throat, unbidden. “I know I beat him in the end, but for so many years all I could do was run and hide. I just sat there and let the water pour in around me. I didn’t know that I could fight back. I didn’t know how to do anything but wait to drown.”
“Oh no, Effy. That’s not what I meant at all. You don’t have to take up a sword. Survival is bravery, too.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“Effy found herself half in love with the Fairy King sometimes, too. The tender belly of his cruelty made her heart flutter. There was an intimacy to all violence, she supposed. The better you knew someone, the more terribly you could hurt them.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“...only then do I feel right inhabiting this walking cage, otherwise my body is merely a grotesque, useless thing. I want to chop myself to bits and be fed to the fish in the canal.”
― Elle Nash, Deliver Me

“We all live this way; things fall apart and their corpses rot in front of us as we adapt to a lesser way of living.”
― Elle Nash, Deliver Me

“It’s my job to endure him.”
― elle nash, Deliver Me

“I’m drawn to him because of this lingering ferocity I see in men- the possibility of violence. The kind of man I prayed for all those years ago, I didn’t consider the other side of it. What the roots of loving someone like that would be, what it would grow into. And now, that possibility has snarled itself so thick into my life I am suspended within it.”
― Elle Nash, Deliver Me

“There's a chance my present has ceased. If that's the case—if I'm gone—I had two hopes: to map a way of healing form a form of violence I never totally understood, if it's understandable at all, and to provide a guide on how a person in the present of their lives might speak the unspeakable. Language failed me for many years. All I did was run and scream. That might be my legacy, too.”
― Kyle Dillon Hertz, The Lookback Window

“..the pain of being was unimaginable and yet here they were—imagined”
― Kyle Dillon Hertz, The Lookback Window

“But I'm trying to talk to the adult Dylan who escaped and saved his own life. You are free. Even now, the door is unlocked, and if you want to leave you can leave. Do you hear me?”
― Kyle Dillon Hertz, The Lookback Window

“...we continued to make out, like teenagers, like boys who had never been raped, like men who had once been—you know what I mean.”
― Kyle Dillon Hertz, The Lookback Window

“A breeze was promising fall, even though fall had already come”
― Kyle Dillon Hertz, The Lookback Window

“Like I've said before, sometimes I doubted I was alive, and now I was renting a belief in my own humanity, mustering a brief importance I needed to defend, in order to walk across the street right into the offices and demand what I deserved.”
― Kyle Dillon Hertz, The Lookback Window

“The only way you survived was to keep what you loved secret. Otherwise, you might soon be handcuffed in the dark.”
― Kyle Dillon Hertz, The Lookback Window

“I was somewhere in the future, granting myself resolve I did not yet believe myself to have; I was hoping someday this day might be useful to a person I wasn't yet.”
― Kyle Dillon Hertz, The Lookback Window