Beth

“I’d have known what that meant, when I was young,” he said, sounding strange, and sad. “Do you ever feel like your whole life happened to you in languages you don’t speak any more?” That hit me deeper than I expected. “All the time. What is it?” “I’ve forgotten,” he said, apologetic.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Hymn to Dionysus

“felt like an old candle that had sat forgotten on a shelf for years, frozen into the same lumpy awkward shape, dull with dust, but now here was the fire again, and I was softening and changing and finding I didn’t have to be that cold shape forever, and the wax was turning warm and bright again. He’d burn me away altogether before long, but it was worth it.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Hymn to Dionysus

“Our duty is part of us, we can’t just leave it on the side of the road."
Pentheus thought about it for a little while. He had his hair over his shoulder on his sun side to keep his neck from burning, and with the gold beads threaded through into their half-crown, he looked like Helios. “I thought that too. But then... when I was in the maze, duty didn’t feel like a part of me at all. It was just chains. I suppose if you’re born in chains and so is everyone you know and you never, ever see them come off, then you would think they were part of you and something awful would happen if you found the key, but it didn’t feel awful. I felt like I could breathe.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Hymn to Dionysus

“Humans are weird animals; partly we’re wild, and partly we are clockwork. Unholy devices, all of us—mechanisms bolted onto bone.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Hymn to Dionysus