Dannii Elle’s Reviews > Dreams of the Dying > Status Update

"This country was never about who works the hardest, it's about being born into the right family or fitting the narrative."

"The hallmark of a healthy mind, Jespar now understood, was the ethereal cord that tethered the mind to the body, the psychic to the physical. This link was vital: all body, and a human became a hull, unable to think or dream. All thought, and they lost the ability to walk the soil of reality, became echoes waiting to fade."

"The world is hard, a voice in his mind says. You need to be harder.

Monsters exist, another replies. And you're one of them."

The ratio of rotting corpses per page is so high!

"Fear had many shades: there was the blazing kind you felt when an enemy charged at you; the chilly kind you felt traversing a dark alley; the harrowing kind when you were trapped in a cave during a blizzard, hoping someone heard your screams... the worst had always been the pernicious and silent kind, like when you suddenly realised your little sister hadn't left her room all day and how eerily quiet the house was."

"we all draw a line between the good we could do and the good we actually do."

I fell far from my goal of finishing this book before 2020 concluded but at least I am fairly certain that I am beginning the new year with a 5-star read.

"There was something unique about the silence that reigned those nights - a mixture of peace and the haunting but strangely beguiling notion that he was all alone during those nocturnal strolls, as if some quiet, otherworldly occurrence had caused everyone but him to peacefully vanish, leaving behind a skeleton world where Jespar was the only one still alive. A boy sleepwalking on the bottom of the ocean."

"Pawns let themselves be done to, masters do. You can have all the riches in the world and still be a pawn, or you can be a fisherman and be a master. It's all a question of the right mindset."

"The mind is a malleable thing. Soil if you're feeling poetic. Depending on the seed, anything will grow in it, from graceful gardens to idyllic meadows, from weedy forests to foggy swamps. Harmonious or chaotic, peaceful or perilous, healthy or ill. It's all a matter of seeds."

What an opening paragraph!