The Incandescent Quotes

“Almost no one was paying for magical boarding school because of the magic. The magic was an interesting quirk, a historical curiosity, in a few cases a genuine passion being indulged by a loving parent—but you didn’t pay fifty thousand pounds a year for magic tricks, any more than you paid it for Shakespeare or the respiratory system or the ability to solve quadratic equations. No: Chetwood’s school fees were insurance money, a policy taken out against the future. Let my child be safe. Let my child be happy. Let my child have every single possible chance at freedom, joy, hope, power. Because an elite education was an investment in power. Magic was the least of what you gained at Chetwood. What mattered was the power to walk the walk and talk the talk, to have your résumé picked out of the pile”
― Emily Tesh, The Incandescent

“Selves came and went. They grew and grew. You discovered something to be and then you learned how to inhabit it with every inch of your being.”
― Emily Tesh, The Incandescent

“A self is a home is a purpose is a life. But above all those, a self is a choice.”
― Emily Tesh, The Incandescent

“For every sentimental my teacher changed my life story you heard, there were dozens of my teacher made me moderately bored a few times a week and then I got through the year and moved on with my life and never thought about them again.”
― Emily Tesh, The Incandescent

“Walden looked down at the face of the boy in her arms. He was so young.

Look at us now, Charlie, she thought. Look at me.
Look at me, with my hair dyed back to brown, long sleeves over my tattoos, cosplaying my own grandmother most of the time; look at me, nearly forty, not speaking their language, not getting their jokes - oh, you would laugh. But you should have been here too. You should have travelled like you wanted to, you should have visited me in California, you should have kept making music. Maybe it would've worked out, maybe not. Maybe by now you'd be married with children, losing your hair and putting on weight and playing guitar at the weekends and you'd have learned what I've learned, that there's joy in finding good work to do and doing it, there's joy in looking back along the path you walked and knowing you wouldn't change it. Oh, we wouldn't have believed it, and you never got the chance to find out, but Charlie, Charlie, it feels so good to grow up.”
― Emily Tesh, The Incandescent

“A self is a home is a purpose is a life. But above all those, a self is a choice.)”
― Emily Tesh, The Incandescent

“Teaching wasn’t about being right”
― Emily Tesh, The Incandescent

“I'm not even that much older than you, in the grand scheme of things, but you already have generational challenges I never had to deal with. No one in my vear had their own phone in the middle school. That alone - the expectation to keep complex technology with you at all times - puts you and all your peers in the middle of an ongoing demonic threat that didn't exist twenty years ago. And that's only one of the differences between your experience and mine, and by no means the most meaningful.”
― Emily Tesh, The Incandescent

“A self is a home is a purpose is a life. But above all those”
― Emily Tesh, The Incandescent

“Sometimes Walden regretted being a grown-up. It meant you could not say what you actually thought.”
― Emily Tesh, The Incandescent

“She reflected in passing on how much history had been made by men presumably suffering from the aftereffects of traumatic childhood neglect.”
― Emily Tesh, The Incandescent

“There are reasons why a highly qualified person might choose the job where she'll be underestimated and undervalued forever.”
― Emily Tesh, The Incandescent

“The woman over the age of 25 would look anything but dubious in the face of a smiling, posh chap with high cheekbones.”
― Emily Tesh, The Incandescent