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

“You stop, and you turn back into stars. Mum says everyone’s made of stars. Is that true?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, and liked Anna even more than before. ‘All matter is forged by nuclear fusion reactions in the hearts of stars. They take hydrogen atoms, which are the littlest bits of the stuff the world is made of, and they bolt them together into bigger and bigger atoms – helium, oxygen, carbon, everything. All the atoms that make you. You’re star dust.’ She looked pleased with that. ‘And then when my atoms have finished being me, they go off back to the stars?’ ‘Some of them will be rain, some will be earth, some will float away and light up when the solar wind comes, and that makes the aurora. And like you say, some of them will find their way back into a star.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Half Life of Valery K

“Chivalry—Kuroda, you know when women put vegetables on a spoon and zoom it round so their kids think it's a magic butterfly or something? Chivalry is just what your mum called being a decent human being so you'd feel like a really good boy when you were nice to people. Don't say it to grown-ups.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

“She waited by the blackboard, trying to scrape up enough of her abysmal Japanese to ask what was going on. Lectures were always in English, which was just as well, because she had the linguistic capability of a sea cucumber. As far as she could tell, the word for ‘husband’ and the word for ‘prisoner’ were identical. Half the faculty were still worried that she’d got Baron Matsumoto locked away in her attic.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Lost Future of Pepperharrow