Dannii Elle > Recent Status Updates

"Vengeance ought to be spoken through gritted teeth, spittle flying, the cords of one's soul so entangled in it that you can't let it go, even if you try... you speak it like it's a still-beating heart clenched in your fist and there's blood running down your arm, dripping off your elbow, and you can't let go. Feral didn't speak it like that at all... Vengeance was just a word to him."

Jumanji meets Ready Player One? Say no more!

"Dream up something wild and improbable," she pleaded. "Something beautiful and full of monsters."
"Beautiful and full of monsters?"
"All the best stories are."

“There were no books to hide behind, and no shadows—only Lazlo Strange in his worn gray robes, with his nose that had been broken by fairy tales, looking like the hero of no story ever told.
Or. No story yet told.”

"A man should have squint lines from looking at the horizon, not just from reading in dim light."

"'What changed?'
...
'You made me care.'"

MY HEART!!

"Time is a digger, time scratches and claws its way into any prison sooner or later. Time is not a healer - it's a destroyer. Time is ruin. Time opens old wounds."

"What should you do? Who should you be? Everyone wants answers to those questions. Life isn't that simple though. There's no one thing we should do, no guiding quest, just as there's no one person we should be. I'm full of different voices, pulled in a dozen different directions. Aren't you?"

"There are stars in every darkness. They are the mercy of the Gods in the Sky."

"Many babies have killed, but it very rare that the victim is not their mother."

WHAT A FIRST LINE!!

Restarting this one, seen as I've abandoned my reread and annotations since December. I don't usually annotate my books, but this one is so beautifully written and one of my top five favourite stories so I'm really enjoying the process of noting all the many things I love about it, even if it is a time-consuming task.

"To a parent, your child wasn't a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once."

"Everyone sees race... The only difference is who pretends not to."

"The fireman said there were little fires everywhere," Lexie said. "Multiple points of origin. Possible use of accelerant. Not an accident."

"grief spread its wings large like an eagle, grief huddled small like a porcupine; grief needed company, grief craved solitude; grief wanted to remember, wanted to forget; grief raged, grief whimpered; grief made time compress and contract; grief tasted like hunger, felt like numbness, sounded like silence; grief tasted like bile, felt like blades, sounded like all the noise of the world."

"'You know this country used to be great.'

'When was that?'

'Not so long ago. When it understood that a welfare state was something you built up instead of tearing down, when it saw migrants as people to be welcomed, not turned away. Imagine what it would be like to live in such a nation."

"Everything else you can live around, but not death. Death you have to live through."

"For girls, becoming women was inevitable; for boys, becoming men was ambition."

"Sometimes you just have to feel bad about a thing. Sometimes that's the only thing that makes you human."

Maas is just such a comforting writer, for me. t's so good to be back in one of her worlds.

This was one of my favourite series when I was younger. I'm rereading my original copies and the pages are starting to fall out, which is making me sad.

"The Book of the Ancestor says that for everything there is a season. This was a time to reap. A time for death. A time to die."

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That is all.

"War is coming, little Nona. Wars are always coming. You give them hell! Remember that anger. You’ll need it!"

"The fight matters. But in the end it is never truly won or lost, and victory lies in discovering that we are bigger than it is."

"Nona Grey could tear this street... She could blast you with such force that the amulets your gold has purchased would burn and fall to dust. And before I could take a single step to stop her you would all be smoking offal amid the ruin...You should know that I would do everything with my power to bring her to the emperor’s justice after such an outburst. But it would be scant consolation to your corpses.’

"Abbess Glass had taught Nona the value of lies. The one thing she
had never managed to teach her was not to feel bad for telling them."

"There might not be a meaning to the world, or in it, but that does not mean that what we do has no meaning."

The Breathing Method - 4.5/5 stars

It took me almost an entire month to get through this only half of this. No fault of the book, but I just couldn't summon the mental energy for how DENSE it is. I'm definitely going to commit to finishing the rest off in May, and learn my lesson that this is not a book you can pick up and put down or read another book alongside.