The Girl with Borrowed Wings Quotes

“He had an extraordinarily casual air about him. I'd noticed that before, when he had tossed himself out the window.”
― Rinsai Rossetti, The Girl with Borrowed Wings

“I used to come here to think," he told me, landing beside the tree. It was so short that my head was only a few inches above his.
"Sangris," I said in shock, "you think? When did this start?”
― Rinsai Rossetti, The Girl with Borrowed Wings

“I frowned. Evidently, Sangris wasn't a cat who could shape-shift. It was more difficult than that. He was a nothing who occasionally pretended to be a cat. "I wish I could know what it's like for myself, that's all," I said. I felt rather the way a jail inmate would if a bird flew up and shouted through her window bars: This freedom thing? Yeah, not so great.”
― Rinsai Rossetti, The Girl with Borrowed Wings

“Then I got to my feet, and, taking my arms, he drew me out of my picture frame, into the darkness and the heat, to a place where the ground was frighteningly, thrillingly far away, and the sunless sky was burning and trembling all around us.”
― Rinsai Rossetti, The Girl with Borrowed Wings

“I rely on a backbone of books and, for the most part, it's enough to keep me quiet, half-drugged with dreams of imaginary worlds.”
― Rinsai Rossetti, The Girl with Borrowed Wings

“When it was time to leave, Sangris remained human, his favorite form nowadays. He simply grew an assortment of wings: sometimes dark sculptural bat wings that curled above his back and made him, with his wavy black hair and yellow eyes, look like a venerable demon; sometimes big soft feathery wings that made him look like a little boy playing dress-up. In the hot afternoons when I took naps alone in my room, I could still feel the rocking of those wings, up and down, before I went to sleep, and I'd drift off on a sea of imaginary waves. The beat of flying had become the rhythm of my dreams.”
― Rinsai Rossetti, The Girl with Borrowed Wings

“Dying leaves shivered down from the trees along the street, falling around us like showers of sequins.”
― Rinsai Rossetti, The Girl with Borrowed Wings

“As I spoke, the neighborhood seemed to become more solid. I grew uneasy listening to the murmur of human voices in the houses. It had just occurred to me that I might know some of these people, that I was really here. It seemed to me that if I peered through the chinks in the wooden shutters I would see myself curled up inside, barefooted, loud-voiced, smelling of bug spray.”
― Rinsai Rossetti, The Girl with Borrowed Wings

“It was a bright humid night in Chiang Mai. Sangris and I trotted toward the night bazaar, stepping over the basketfuls of fried red chili that the sellers had spread out on the streets like open bowls of flowers.

Finding a canal on the fringes of the market, we fed enormous gold carp. They curled through the water like submerged flames beneath the heavy tropical-black sky. Acting innocent, I bought him orange juice and watched his face change when he realized that the sellers had filled it with salt. A trick to prevent dehydration, I explained, and ran off cackling before he could get revenge. I wanted to go into the orchid farms and the butterfly gardens, but they were closed, and I refused his offer to break in (of course Sangris had a way of assuming that rules didn't apply to him, but, I said, they applied to me), so we walked along a half-lit street instead, warm greenness and humming insects all around us, and spent hours trying to catch the guppies that swarmed in innumerable pots by the roadsides. I was better at it: I could lift my hands out of the green-tinted, plant-filled water slowly, without startling the fish, and show him the flashes of yellow and orange and violet and red guppies that flickered through the water cupped in my palms like a strange and magical treasure.”
― Rinsai Rossetti, The Girl with Borrowed Wings

“The river waters were bright honey, as intensely colored as paint. A faint mist drifted over its surface. The forest massing on either side was so dense it looked black, except where, strangely delicate, a slash of flowers glowed white, or tear-shaped mangoes dripped pale green. Strange smells seeped out of the foliage, savory and disturbing. There was the sense of unknown things hiding beneath that painted-honey water, behind the screen of trees, even below the slowly creaking planks of dock we stood on. Animal noises rumbled together in an ever-present background thunder, but no life was actually visible, apart from a single butterfly tumbling over the water, its wings flickering red as a racing heart.”
― Rinsai Rossetti, The Girl with Borrowed Wings

“How was I supposed to grow and live stuck in a place like this? Even weeds couldn't grow here, so what chance did I have? The bird was lucky that it had turned to bone - it suited the desert better now. Bone and dust is natural. Flesh isn't. I could tell that the desert sensed me as something impudent and short-lived, and it was slowly creeping around, sucking the air out of me, turning me into a part of the place I hated. A dry hard land and a dry hard girl to match. I wanted shadows and movement and mossy things, and a living sun instead of a dead one, but it was all out of reach and my body was useless, wingless.”
― Rinsai Rossetti, The Girl with Borrowed Wings

“The desert looked pale and perfect at dawn. The dunes lying in vast interlocked patterns. Almost pink - but that didn't fool me. Nothing was alive down there, nothing soft. Even the trees were armored. The acacias buckled under the weight of their spikes, and they grabbed their leaves close and stingy around themselves, refusing to spread out green, keeping gray instead, as if the color were a hoard of treasure they were afraid to share.

And beyond that, on the horizon, a flat yellow sun sliding up into a dull white sky, a cardboard sunrise.”
― Rinsai Rossetti, The Girl with Borrowed Wings

“We're in the Spanish countryside," Sangris said, "by a centuries-old pilgrim route. Fresh air. Those enormous flowers, so many of them that they cover the entire hill. Trees that look as if they've been painted. They make a sound like a flowing river, don't they? A stone well, in the shade. Dark green, gold, black." He paused. His hands were still over mine. "I can imagine someone sitting here, thinking of you, but a different you. Different from what your father wants, I mean, and more like you are now. Your father's Freneqer seems like she'd be thought up in a dull drawing room somewhere. But here . . . everything is ancient and lovely and bold and dusty and romantic. It's the sort of place where a poet would be born. Either a poet or a revolutionary.”
― Rinsai Rossetti, The Girl with Borrowed Wings

“Our search lasted hours. We discovered treasures. A field of wedding-white blossoms, but with a few firework-colored flowers seething underneath, like rebels. An abandoned pair of boots on top of a hill. Odd spots where cobwebs had been spun between the trees, so that thatches of silver gleamed in midair like suspended pockets of rain.”
― Rinsai Rossetti, The Girl with Borrowed Wings